The Meaning Of God In Human Experience A Philosophic Study Of Religion

129773

THE MEANING OF GOD
IN HUMAN EXPERIENCE

THE MEANING OF GOD
IN HUMAN EXPERIENCE

A PHILOSOPHIC STUDY OF RELIGION

BY

WILLIAM ERNEST HOCKING

NEW HAVEN AND LONDON
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright 1912 by Yale University Proas.
Fourteenth printing, June 1963.
Printed in the United StatoH of America by
The Colonial Press Inc., Clinton, Maw.
All rights reserved. This book may not, ho
reproduced, m whole or in part, m any form
(except hy reviewers for the public prow),
without written permission from tho publishers.
Library of Congress catalog number: 12 -141)46

TO
A. B. OIL H.

AN UNFAILING SOURCE OF INSIGHT

FOREWORD
by John E. Smith

The Meaning of God in Human Experience stands as one
of the serious philosophical treatments of religion in the
twentieth century. It is also Hocking's most representa-
tive work. The book exhibits not only that original
synthesis of idealism and pragmatism which marks Hock-
ing's thought, but it gives evidence as well of an im-
portant but lesser-known strain in his philosophy — a
reliance on experience of a radical sort. The Meaning oj
God is a subtle book; the persistent tendency of its au-
thor to understate the case puts the reader on his mettle.
The sense one has of participating directly in the prob-
lems it treats is due to the experiential standpoint from
which it was written. Religious questions are posed in
the form in which they actually confront us. The fact,
moreover, that Hocking, like James, appears to be wres-
tling with the issues as he writes about them engages the
reader and forces him to take a silent part in the discus-
sion.

It was, of course, William James who set the pattern
in American thought of treating religion from the stand-
point of direct experience. There have been others, the
so-called "empirical theologians" among them, who laid
claim to the heritage of James. But their conception of
experience was often too narrow — in an effort to emulate
science, they thought only in terms of sensible data and

viii FOREWORD

facts thus losing experience in that larger sense which
religion requires. Hocking is the true heir of James; he
inherited the legacy and developed it further. Not only
did he continue the line of radical empiricism, but he was
in possession of a metaphysical outlook which James
lacked. Hocking saw the metaphysical importance of
experience; he knew how to go beyond description to the
discovery of what experience can tell us about the gen-
eral nature of things.

If Hocking has been the true heir of Jaracs, he has also
been the genuine successor of Royce. Throughout The
Meaning of God we are constantly reminded of Roycc's
speculative drive as we follow Hocking'ti persistent at-
tempt to understand religion, to clarify the ideas central
to it and to argue for its necessity in the cosmic scheme.
It would be an error, however, to think of Hocking as
primarily a rearranger of ideas or doctrines passed on by
others. The marks of his predecessors arc there, but his
work has its own originality. Not only did he treat novel
issues such as the problem of a world religion in a fresh
way, but he was able to place religion within the frame-
work of a more rigorous ontology than James, and his
analyses show a greater sensitivity to experience than
those of Royce.

Though written exactly half a centxiry ago, The Mean-
ing of God has a peculiar relevance for the current situ-
ation. Themes in the center of contemporary discussion
are precisely those at the heart of I locking's argument;
merely to mention them is to move at once into the im-
mediate present. As a counterpart to recent questions
about the meaningfulness of the concept of God, Hock-
ing sought for its "original sources" in experience. He

FOREWOKD ix

refused to abandon experiential foundations and, like
Peirce, his conception of experience is broad enough to
enable us to say that having an idea is also having an
experience. The Ontological Argument for God's exist-
ence, so often killed and resurrected, once again shows
signs of coming to life; Hocking presents a novel recast-
ing of that argument and at the same time shows the
proper meaning of proof or demonstration in religion. In
dealing with the perennial difficulty of showing the re-
lation between religion as a generic feature of human ex-
perience and "positive" religion as represented by a
specific Church or Communion, Hocking develops the
"principle of alternation," the insight that, while religion
has essentially to do with the Whole, the man of faith is
always a concrete individual who lives in the world and
who, when he comes to worship, finds it necessary to
view religion as one more part or aspect of life beside
others.

There is a growing sense at present that we must find
ways of understanding the presence of God in Nature —
the exclusively anthropological approach shows certain
deficiencies. Hocking saw the point years ago and he
argues that Nature is the universal mediator of the
Divine. Our experience of Nature as shot through with
mystery furnishes a starting point; as we come to judge
the quality of the Whole we gradually discern in the
workings of Nature a Power which takes on personal
character. In seeking knowledge of Nature we discover
our own limitation; in the sense that we are not alone in
knowing Nature, we come to understand that what re-
mains unknown to us is yet knowable. The original ex-
perience of God through Nature is best described as the

x FOREWORD

sense that "I know not, but He knows/7 Science then
becomes the quest for what God knows.

The strength of Hockiiig's thought is in its richness,
its suggestiveness, and its profundity. His logic is a
massive one; it is necessary to work through the whole
in order to apprehend it. Having grasped the main
thrust of his argument, one can go back to tho details
and carry the critical discussion from there. Tt is to be
hoped that the return of The Meaning of God to the
current scene will have its own powerful effect in leading
on to a renewal of discussion about religion which com-
bines metaphysical depth with experiential bearings.

New Haven, Connecticut
September 1962

PREFACE TO THE 1963 EDITION

4 T the time of this book's appearance, just a half-
jL\. century ago, its title carried a challenge to pre-
vailing ideas about human experience. "Religious ex-
perience" was a common phrase; but God — as a being
beyond the world whom "no man hath seen at any time"
— was not presumed to be a direct factor in experience.
There were "proofs of the existence of God" ; and we do
not attempt nor require proofs of an existence we can
directly verify.

Our Western world was at that time under the spell
of a notion of experience stemming as much from Locke
as from Descartes, in which the stuff of sense-data to-
gether with the awareness of our own mental life were
the basic ingredients. This pattern on all empirical
knowledge was wholly successful in developing the
methods of an expanding science of Nature, from which
the notion of purpose was in principle excluded. The
Modern Period, as we commonly term it, could almost
be defined as the period of human self-reliance, aided
by the techniques proposed by the sciences — a period of
getting on without God, for all practical purposes.

The great technical failure of this notion of experience
was its inability to account for one's knowledge of other
selves. Ourselves we can experience, and nature; but
minds other than our own were considered conjectures
aided by language, whose meanings we can never directly
compare or verify. On this basis, the social sciences,

xii PREFACE

growing by leaps and bounds, have no direct data] and
even psychology, hesitating to depend on introspection,
must present itself as a science of "behavior." The term
"behavioral sciences" is a flag of defeat.

Modernity completely failed to resolve the dilemma
of "solipsism"; and with its inability to find an experi-
ence of other selves would follow its deeper inability to
find an experience of God. I had for some time been of
the belief that these barriers could be surmounted and
that they would fall together. In my own experience
they did; this book is to that extent autobiographical.

But it marks also a notable general turning away from
the sense-data-mental-data pattern of admitted experi-
ence. The very vitality of the twentieth century is due
to its rejection of that pattern, its appeal to experience
neither physical nor ego-centered. Beside the, vast fields
of social enquiry, the experience of values aesthetic and
ethical, there is a new recognition of tho immense im-
portance of our central and inarticulate awaroness of
existence which I have ventured to call "nuclear experi-
ence/' rich in structure and meaning.

In this nuclear experience there are always three
factors, an I, a Thou, and a common subject matter, let
us say an It. Taken in its totality, this It is simply tho
world in which the I must work out its life. But the
Thou, here discerned as always present, lends to tho
world, the It, a character which completely efTaeos tho
privacy-limit of Descartes' "1 think, therefore I am";
the It is no longer merely My world, tho It is Our world.
What I find true of it is true for everyone; my experi-
ence has a touch of universality: science is possible*!
The triumphant march of modernity is now understood.

PREFACE mi

And understanding it, we pass beyond it: we enter a
postmodern era.

Nuclear experience calls for a wealth of interpretation.
Under the names phenomenology and existentialism
this task has occupied much of the present century. The
nuclear Thou-art (whose encounter is the theme of the
mystics of all ages, and whose dialogue with the self
has been described with such discerning power by
Martin Buber) is never experienced merely as a co-
subject, but rather as a creative will sustaining my own
being (hence caring for my existence), an activity in-
viting a response, a launch as of "animal faith," a
summons to find in experience directives that indicate
"this way lies your fulfillment, your task, your destiny."

The factual world confronting this "We are" presents
no open path. As particular, it is necessarily "irrational,"
never deducible from a Platonic order of ideas nor from
a Whiteheadian system of "eternal objects." There is
in the situation an inescapable factor of adventure and
risk in which life and death stand adjacent, with pos-
sibilities of tragedy and despair. Yet Angst is inadequate
to the situation.

For with the certitudes of truth there are also certi-
tudes of action, possibilities of rising beyond futility to
control of the opening issues. In the inquiry into the
conditions of the "prophetic consciousness" we have an
answer to Angst and to despair, perhaps the most
pertinent contribution of the book to the disturbed
morale of an age of conflict and bent-to-death.

WILLIAM ERNEST HOCKING.
Madison, New Hampshire
February 1963

PREFACE TO THE 1912 EDITION

THE services of thought to religion have been sub-
ject to a justified distrust. Of uncertain worth,
especially of uncertain recoil, are the labors of reason in
behalf of any of our weightier human interests. By right
instinct has religion from the beginning looked elsewhere
for the brunt of support and defense — say to revela-
tion, to faith, to feeling. A bad defense is a betrayal ;
and what human philosophy of religion can be better
than a bad defense ?

Present-day philosophy seems notably inclined to take
this view of itself. Is it not Bradley, elder metaphysician
to our time, wno jots down that metaphysics is the
finding of bad reasons for what we believe on instinct?
Keason is not incapable of recognizing and confessing
its own limits : it may even take pride in expounding
them, an attitude which since Hume and Kant has be-
come more or less fashionable. Our current science of
religion may now assume without too much discussion
that the grounds of religion are super-rational, or sub-
rational : and we find philosophy undertaking to define
what these othei>-than-rational grounds are — grounds
moral perhaps, or psychological, or social, or historical;
grounds pragmatic, or even mystic. Various and vari-
ously combined as are these several philosophic trends,
they agree in accepting the judgment that religion lies
close to the primitive moving-forces of life : deeper, then,
than reason or any work of reason.

xvi PREFACE

But a vague territory still is this Beyond-reason or
Deeper-than-reason. Once singly-named Faith, now it
has many names — instinct, the subconscious, the co-
conscious, feeling, will, value-judgment, social sense, in-
tuition, mystic reason, perhaps V&lan vital — as its bor-
der is touched in various scientific excursions. Some
unclearness has come with the abundance of our learning,
some confusion of categories, no doubt ; we can hardly
yet say that we know better than our forefathers what
religion is, though perhaps we know better what it is
not. The one impression which does distinctly emerge
from the multitude of contemporary suggestions is a
negative one: a general disaffection from the religion
of reason, and from its philosophical framework, abso-
lute idealism.

Some doubt the fundamental proposition of this ideal-
ism, namely, that all reality is of the same stuff that
ideas are made of, that " whatever is is rational." Some
doubt its doctrine that everything is known to one abso-
lute Knower, whose being is thought, or Idea. And
some there are who do not doubt the«e propositions ;
who will not deny logical force, even finality, to ideal-
istic arguments — if one must argxie : but who add the
comment that whatever is vital in religion i« missed in
all logic-work, is necessarily and forever missed, thought
and religion being once for all incommensurate. They
do not find the Absolute of idealism identical with the
God of religion : they cannot worship the Absolute* And
they do not find that religion consists in our human
knowledge of this absolute Knower: >Denken, they
think, ist nicht Gottesdienst.

In this general dissatisfaction with idealism, and in our

PREFACE

unclear efforts to win elsewhere a positive groundwork
for religion, I find the sufficient warrant for such a study
as this book undertakes. It enquires what, in terms of
experience, its God means and has meant to mankind (for
surely religion rises out of experience and pays back
into it again) : and it proposes, by aid of the labors of
all co-workers, critics and criticised alike, to find the
foundations of this religion, whether within reason or
beyond.

This purpose is not over-bold; though no serious treat-
ment of religion dare be over-modest. It is not over-
bold, first, because it is a human necessity. We must
reach some working clarity in these matters, every indi-
vidual soul of us : the problem is there ; we shall work
it through well or ill, get our solution honorably or by
default. Is there not in all positive living a similar ne-
cessity for what we may call presumption ? The world
too is there, with work to be done, votes to be cast, a
new generation to be trained and harnessed, and other
like requirements — all equally impossible. All such un-
dertakings might well be postponed by any man under
the true plea of unfitness : nevertheless all this is to be
done, and all will get itself done in some fashion, cred-
itable or discreditable. It is, in fact, an old ruse of na-
ture's, this of clothing the necessary in the guise of the
impossible, making a dignified way of escape for him
who prefers to escape from complete living, calling for
something like presumption on the part of him who will
not escape. Let us rather say, calling for performance
simply, categorical performance. Nature creates the re-
quirement : let nature supply ways and means.

mil PREFACE

Our purpose is not over-bold, secondly, because, after
all, the truth about religion cannot be in itself obscure
or intricate. Subtle religion is false religion. Our diffi-
culties are indeed made by our laboring philosophies
themselves. The quaint words of Berkeley still hold
good : " We havejfirft raifed a duftand then complain
we cannot fee." The truth about religion is to be had;
but not by surpassing others in more mighty Hounder-
ingand dust-raising: this truth is traditionally for "him
that hath eyos to see and ears to hear" in a certain
quietude of mind.

Only — be it at once said — the dust-raising in the
present case is a much more important process than the
words of Berkeley imply. In the new philosophies is new
truth, and much of it — no mere now misunderstanding.
Whatever murkiness there is marks, I believe, a genuine
deepening of spiritual consciousness in our Western
world : a new appreciation of faith, a new love of life
and its variety, a new ability to be both bond and free —
speculatively, spiritually, free, whilu not less scientifically
bond, historically bond, even traditionally bond. It is
a symptom of any such valid deepening of thought that
men know less clearly what they want than what they
do not want. The older philosophy has failed to satisfy;
the newer philosophies have not yet Bucwodml in satisfy-
ing : the work of proposing and rejecting must continue
until conscionce at its profomuler level can again rest.

It is just Ixwanfto of this veritablo growth that clover-
ness and erudition poured out in abundance do nowa-
days visibly pail and fail of their usual effect : for clever-
ness and erudition operate within the already acquired
conceptions of mankind — they stand ineffective before

PREFACE xix

what is new-born. For this reason, in part, the weighty
scholarship of Germany loses some little ground in these
fields. If we know the kind of thing that a given type
of scholarship has to offer, then even great virtuosity,
though it be prolific of the Very True, must sweat to
provoke an interest, still more to arouse our faith. The
thing now required is a simple thing, a common word,
a slight increment of ultimate sincerity somewhere that
can reunite our roots with mother earth. We are as
well off above ground as we can be until we are better
off below ground. What boots it though a man can pro-
duce out of his inner consciousness a veritable banyan
forest if there is, in all, no growth downward ? There is,
I say, a quiet and canny maturity of conscience abroad
which knows surely what it does not want, a new-born
thing in the world, the source of our new philosophies,
— in particular of our pragmatisms, our realisms, our
mysticisms, — the doom of the old, the doom also of the
new that fail to arrive at reality : the lash at the back
of the thinker, and the hope in his soul.

Meanwhile, the general deepening of consciousness,
and of conscience, is a deepening of religion itself. The
formulae that were once potent here too begin to fail :
ideas and phrases, gritty a generation ago, a decade ago,
are already worn smooth and lend no more friction to
any human work. A new calling has sprung up : that
of creed-making, or of creed phrase-making ; and many
of our wise men take part in it. These too have their
new Reality to face, merciless as a child. If the spirit
of the age is but feebly responsive to new phrase or old,
hasten not to judge that the spirit of the age is becom-
ing irreligious : may not the opposite theory as well ea>

*x PREFACE

plain its indifference to us (though with less salve for
our vanity) ? Potentially, at least, men are becoming
more religious. This development of religion is still a
latent fact, mightier than any yet-visible shape or move-
ment, discernible at times only as a cloud dim and vast,
strained and full of repressed lightning. The release of
these forces is no small human object.

In what respect, then, is idealism inadequate to these
new demands ? And what is the truth which the critics
of idealism have to offer ? It may be well to state at
once (especially for the satisfaction of fellow-students in
these fields) the substance of our belief on these points,
outlining in rough summary the position in which the
work of this book results.

The weakness in the armor of classical idealism has
been made apparent, I believe, by pragmatism — or
rather, by the pragmatic principle of judgment. Ideal-
ism does not do the work of religious truth ; ergo, it
is not the truth of religion. This judgment may be ac-
cepted without further commitment to the philosophy
that pronounces it (for is it not also Hegel's principle
that the true idea is known by its work in this concrete
world ? )

Idealism fails to work, I believe, chiefly because it is
unfinished. Unfinishedness is not in itself a blemish ;
is professed even as a special excellence by that remark-
able antisystemist, Henri Bergson.1 But there are tol-
erable and intolerable kinds of unfiniflhednosft. A thing
is properly unfinished when it is finishable ; when it has
an identity that finishing will not change. Let an artist

1 Involution cr&itrlce, p. 209.

PREFACE xxi

sketch a face with all conceivable haste and roughness:
the unfinishedness of the thing is wholly justified if
only it is a thing ; if only it has a character and a sig-
nificance which all later finishing does but develop with-
out displacem en t or substitution. Our philosophies must
meet the same test. Idealism can entertain much of
what pragmatism, realism, and the rest have brought
forward, and still remain idealism ; whether it can en-
tertain all, is doubtful. It is not incapable of admitting
into its world-picture variety, change, growth, person-
ality, freedom, also objectivity of a sort. The question
is, of what sort? — whether the variety is a real variety,
the risk a real risk, the objectivity a real objectivity,
individuality and freedom real — or only shows of re-
ality, infected by that illusoriness and approximateness
which idealism tends to impose upon realistic experi-
ence generally. Can idealism entertain the Real, and
still remain idealism ? What pragmatism has specifically
required of idealism in religion is more genuinely real
opportunity, real freedom, real individual creativity.
What realism desires is more valid objectivity, substan-
tiality in the world beyond self. It is the latter want,
I venture to say, which chiefly limits the effectiveness
of idealism in religion : to satisfy the pragmatic test,
idealism must become more realistic : for idealism in reli-
gion does not give sufficient credence to the authoritative
Object, shows, so far, no adequate comprehension of
the attitude of worship.

Idealism is unfinished, then, not having found its
way to worship : it has not found its way to the par-
ticular and the historical in religion ; to the authorita-
tive and fhi* wholly super-personal. The salvation it

xxii PREFACE

offers men seems still to be, in effect, a salvation from
the particular in the general, the ideal: even though
it names the concrete as its goal, it has not yet been
able in this matter of religion to accomplish union with
the concrete. It might seem that the idealist more than
any other should appreciate the function of the positive
and authoritative in religion ; should know (as Hegel
knew) that only the concrete can breed the concrete;
should know (as Boyce knows) that only the individual
can breed the individual ; should know, then, that only
the historic can bear fruit in history, so that when the
pragmatic test comes, a religion which is but a religion-
in-general, a religion universal but not particular, a reli-
gion of idea, not organically rooted in passion, fact, and
institutional life, must fail.

Idealism means, in name and in truth, the freedom in
this universe of the thinker, the unlimited right of Idea
in a world where nothing that is is ultimately irrational.
But it is the exercise of freedom which alone discovers
ihe rightful place of authority. Only he who has tried (or
tried to imagine) a pure adventure knows that there is no
such tiling as a pure adventure ; for when you have can-
celled path, peak, sky, star, all distinguishable* points in
space, the adventure itself is abolished. The idealist
who by right and intention is the pure adventurer in
the regions of the spirit has not yet experimented his
freedom if he remains unappreciative of authority, in
religion as in knowledge. It is ho who in the owl must
be called upon to expound the worth and use of church,
dogma, creed, priest, mediator, the whole apparatus of
God-worship which religious evolution has produce
God-worship itself*

PREFACE

If idealism declines this responsibility, as being be-
yond its province, beyond reason in fact, belonging to
the practical, or psychological, or anthropological, or
historical aspect of the matter only, it does thereby ac-
knowledge the foundations of religion to be beyond
reason ; implies that to comprehend the truth of religion,
idealism must at last abandon itself.

The pragmatic test has meant much in our time as a
principle of criticism, in awakening the philosophic con-
science to the simple need of fruitfulness and moral ef-
fect as a voucher of truth. It is this critical pragmatism
which first and widely appeals to the intellectual con-
science at large. Negative pragmatism, I shall call it :
whose principle is, " That which does not work is not
true" The corresponding positive principle, tc What-
ever works is true," I regard as neither valid nor use-
ful. But invaluable as a guide do I find this negative
test: if a theory has no consequences, or bad ones; if it
makes no difference to men, or else undesirable differ-
ences ; if it lowers the capacity of men to meet the stress
of existence, or diminishes the worth to them of what
existence they have ; such a theory is somehow false, and we
have no pfcace until it is remedied. I will even go farther,
and say that a theory is false if it is not interesting : a
proposition that falls on the mind so dully as to excite
no enthusiasm has not attained the level of truth ; though
the words be accurate the import has leaked away from
them, and the meaning is not conveyed. Any such cri-
terion of truth is based upon a conviction or thesis other-
wise founded, that the real world is infinitely charged
with interest and value, whereby any commonplaceness

xxiv PREFACE

on our part is evidence of a lack of grasp. Upon this
basis (not apart from it), a negative pragmatism must be
an effective instrument of knowledge.

This instrument is nowhere so significant as in the
field of religious knowledge. What difference is made
to you (and necessarily made to you) by your equipment
of religious ideas and beliefs? If they are powerless,
they are false. Whatever doctrine tends to draw the
fangs of reality, and to leave men uastuug, content,
complacent, and at ease, — that doctrine is a treachery
and a deceit. Note well that it is not pleasantness but
force that sets the mark for truth : we have to require
of our faith not what is agreeable to the indolent spirit
but what is at once a spur and a promise. What do you
think of hell? The doctrine of hell made religion at
one time a matter of first-rate importance : getting your
soul saved made a difference iu your empirical destiny.
If your idealism wipes out your fear of hell, and with it
all sense of infinite risk in the conduct of life, your
idealism has played you false. Trath must be transformed ;
but the transformation of truth must be marked by a
conservation of power ; herewith we have a more defi-
nite expression for the positive basis of our negative
pragmatism. No religion, then, is a true religion which
is not able to make men tingle, yes, even to their phys-
ical nerve tips, with the sense of an infinite hazard, a
wrath to come, a heavenly city to be gained or lost in
the process of time and by the use of our freedom. The
flesh and blood of historical contingencies cannot be
sapped up in the timeless issues of a certain type of
idealism without loss of power, hence loss of truth.

What, again, do you think of God? The God of

PREFACE *xv

orthodoxy is thought of as being so far like man as to
have loves, interests, and powers which make themselves
temporally felt: this God does things in the world
which, if we like, we may call miracles or, if we like bet-
ter, deeds of Providence. Upon this differential work
of God, as contrasted with his total work, was based
much of the urgency of former religious observance,
prayer, and piety. Pragmatism rightly enquires what
becomes of this differential work when God becomes
the All-One of idealism; and what, if the historical will
of God and the acts of Providence disappear from our
creed, is to replace the immediacy and pervasiveness of
the religious interest which those theories encouraged,
and which in themselves (though not in all bearings)
were good. In such wise, the pragmatic principle tends
to confront idealism, as it has never before been con-
fronted, with the substantial values of orthodoxy ; com-
pelling idealism to complete itself by the standard of
these values (I do not say, of these propositions), even
if at the cost of its philosophic identity.

This is the type of service which pragmatism can well
render. As a positive builder it has little to recommend
it* Founding truth ultimately on our human value is
but another attempt, more radical than that of ideal-
ism, at the " pure adventure" : it is an idealism become
more subjective, freedom less bound by authority- It is
the function of the pragmatic test (as of pain and dis-
comfort generally) to point out something wrong ; the
work of discovering what is right must be done by other
means. Knowledge may be obliged to wait long in a
notch well known to be tentative and unsatisfactory

PREFACE

because the satisfactory thing cannot be found as truth
requires. I do not say that action must wait. Decision
has its hour; and if knowledge is absent, the will-to-
believe must come into play : but the will-to-bolieve is
precisely a principle for action, not for knowledge. It
has no place in the age-long work of speculation. The
adoption of an hypothesis as a working-theory or postu-
late does not conceal from the adopter its true nature ;
does not obliterate for him the difference between postu-
late and knowledge.

But is there, then, no inaccessible truth ? no perma*
nent gap in knowledge (such as religious truth might
hold), to be filled up by choice? There is no inaccessible
truth. If any object has possible bearing on human in-
terests, such as to make it matter of choice, it has a
bearing on human fact also — there is some cognitive
way to it. Truth is indeed variously accessible : there
are regions of the world unsounded, long to be unsound-
able, ample playground for imagination ; but in truth-
getting these very regions are to be approached (and are
approached) with a more delicate chivalry just because
of their comparative helplessness — with more care, not
less, to restrain the impulses of subjectivity.

But, at last, is there no unfinished truth f No reality
yet unmade, or in the making ; no chance to co-operate
with God in the work of creation, in determining what
truth shall be? Have we not here the real meaning of
positive pragmatism, and its true significance in religion ?
The world is infinitely unfinished; here lies the oppor-
tunity of freedom, the only excuse, indeed, for timer
existence at all. But of the world, too, we can define a
tolerable and an intolerable uutimshedness : the world

PREFACE xxvii

must have an identity which the work of finishing does
not destroy or from moment to moment displace. Un-
limited co-operation with God in world-making we have ;
not, however, in ultimate God-making. The religious
object offers that identity without which creative free-
dom itself would lack, for us, all meaning. Does it seem
that super-nature is the plastic part of reality, nature
relatively unplastic ? — toward nature must we he
relatively empirical, passive ; toward super-nature rel-
atively self-assertive, creative? I venture to point out
that our creativity in any field follows faithfully the
character of our passivity in that same field, varies with
it not inversely but directly. Here, where our subserv-
ience to objective fact is most massive, here in the
world of sense and nature, our practical creations are
most massive also. And there, in the world of the reli-
gious objects, where myth-making, and world-picturing,
even God-character-building, are most exuberant, —
there the firm steadfastness of objective reality is at its
summit also. An ultimate empiricism, a deference to
what is given, not makable, just in these regions of
the supersensible and the supernatural, is an attitude
wholly necessary to human dignity, and to true religion.
Far less than absolute idealism is positive pragmatism
(radically taken) capable of worship.

If we are right in this, it may appear that pragma-
tism, taken in a constructive sense, is a self -refuting the-
ory. The only kind of truth which in the end can com-
ply with the pragmatic requirement that power shall be
conserved is a non-pragmatic truth, a truth which has
an absolute aspect ; which proposition we shall try to
make good in the course of this treatise. Pragmatism

xxviii PREFACE

is a philosophy which cannot be finished without des-
troying its identity.

Whatever may be the deficiencies of idealism, prag-
matism, if we are right, cannot supply them. How may
it be with mysticism ? Mysticism may have its absolute :
but mysticism finds its metaphysics in experience ; and
mysticism is no stranger to worship. I believe, in fact,
that the requirements both of reason and of beyond-
reason may be met in what mysticism, rightly understood,
may contribute to idealism. Not every mysticism will do.
It is not the " speculative mysticism" of the text-books
that we want ; it is mysticism as a practice of union with
God, together with the theory of that practice. Mys-
ticism may introduce idealism to the religious deed,
ultimately thereby to the particular and authoritative
in religion.

There are mysticisms in which none of us believe.
There is the mysticism of mantic and theurgy — mysti-
cism of supernatural exploit, seeking short-cut to personal
goods. There is another mysticism equally remote from
our affections: world-avoiding, illusion-casting, zero-
worshipping mysticism; living (in self-contradiction)
upon the fruits of a rejected life. This mysticism has
given the name its current color : making it necessary,
perhaps, to ask that we be understood and agreed to-
gether in rejecting it. Prom the standpoint of just this
sound disparagement of these types of mysticism, I have
become persuaded that there is another, even a neces-
sary mysticism. A mysticism as important as dangerous j
whose historical aberrations are but tokens of its power.
It is this mysticism which lends to life that value which

PREFACE

is beyond reach of fact, and that creativity which is be-
yond the docility of reason ; which neither denies nor is
denied by the results of idealism or the practical works
of life, but supplements both, and constitutes the essen-
tial standpoint of religion.

The mystic finds the absolute in immediate experience.
Whatever is mediated is for him not yet the real which
he seeks. This means to some that the mystic rejects all
mediators : the implication is mistaken. To say that a
mediator is not the finality is not to say that a mediator
is nothing. The self-knowing mystic, so far from reject-
ing mediators, makes all things mediators in their own
measure. To all particulars he denies the name God, —
to endow them with the title of mediator between himself
and God. Thus it is that the mystic, representing the
truth of religious practice, may teach idealism the way
to worship, and give it connection with particular and
historic religion.

I have thus sketched, in highly crude and unmodified
manner, the general philosophic attitude of this book.
The philosophies of the present time, when they attain
their own free conclusion, complete themselves in the
same point. Pure thought, and pure voluntarism, share
the fate of the "pure adventure " : they must find rest
in something other, limiting their freedom, yet required
by it. It is the finished pragmatist who best knows the
need of the absolute. It is the finished mystic who best
knows the need of active life and its mediation. It is the
finished idealist who best knows the need of the real-
istic elements of experience; the mystical and author-
itative elements of faith. I know not what name to

xxx PREFACE

give to this point of convergence, nor does name much
matter: it is realism, it is mysticism, it is idealism also,
its identity, I believe, not broken. For in so far as ideal-
ism announces the liberty of thought, the spirituality of
the world, idealism is but another name for philosophy
— all philosophy is idealism. It is only the radical ideal-
ist who is able to give full credit to the realistic, the
naturalistic, even the materialistic aspects of the world
he lives in.

So much it has seemed right to say, by way of gen-
eral philosophic orientation and confession. But in the
work of the book itself no interest is taken in the criti-
cism of thought-systems for their own sakes; our inter-
est there is in the substance and worth of religion, to
be found by whatever instruments of thought may be
at hand.

As to the plan to be followed, T shall accept the prag-
matic question, What does religion do? as a way of
leading into the study of what religion is. In any case,
religion must be understood and judged largely by what
it accomplishes, by the difference it makea in human af-
fairs. If we can at the beginning catali a glimpso of the
sort of result which religion naturally achieves in history
and in personal life, though only by way of a working
hypothesis, we shall have a valuable guide for further
enquiry into the nature of religion.

In taking up this enquiry, the second part of the book
considers with some thoroughness the motives which
have led to the retirement of reanori in religion, and at
the same time to a growing confidence in the worth of
feeling. By deepening our conception of foaling we fiud

PREFACE xxxi

that our anti-intellectual tendencies can be funded for
the most part in the "religion of feeling"; and in com-
ing to terms with that view of religion we solve many
of our problems at once. The issue of this enquiry turns
largely upon reaching a new understanding (chapter xi)
of the actual working-connection in consciousness be-
tween ideas and feelings. It will appear in what way the
value of religion depends upon the religious idea and
its truth.

Hereupon it would be in order to pass at once to the
question of the truth of religious ideas, and especially
of the idea of God as the central idea of religion. But
here, too, it seems permissible first to build up our idea
of God pragmatically, by considering in a series of free
meditations (part three) what interest we may have, hu-
manly speaking, in the unity of our world, in the pres-
ence there of anything changeless and absolute, and in
the existence of a personal deity.

It is the work of the following part to deal directly
with the question, how men know God; to show how
God is found in human experience at large, and how this
knowledge develops in the specifically religious experi-
ence of mankind. It is maintained (in chapters xix to
xxi) that our knowledge of fellow-men depends upon
an original knowledge of God ; not our knowledge of
God upon a prior knowledge of our social world. But
these two aspects of our spiritual experience do develop
each one the other, according to a principle of alterna-
tion which is expounded in the ensuing part (part five),
dealing with mysticism and worship.

It now becomes possible (part six) to set down in more
adequate form what was taken as the beginning of our

xxxii PREFACE

study, namely, the work of God in the world, the way
in which religion becomes fruitful in history, in morals,
in the arts, and in the conquest of pain and evil. There
is no creativity in human life without the Absolute as
one party thereto.

If I have taken frequent occasion in this book to
express dissent from the views both of Professor Royce
and of William James, it is but a sign of the extent to
which I owe to them, my honored masters in these mat-
ters, the groundwork of my thinking. I have differed
freely from both, in the spirit of their own instruction,
but not without the result of finding myself at one with
both in greater measure than I would once have thought
possible — or logically proper!

Most of the work of criticizing the original drafts of
this book, and many an idea for their improvement, I
owe to my wife: in so far as the path of the reader has
been made plain, this is due chiefly to her. The manu-
script was read by Professor George Herbert Palmer,
whose criticism and gonerous interest have been alike
invaluable; by my colleague, Mr. Chariot* A. Bennett,
who has given substantial aid both in the thought nnd
in the work of indexing ; also, in large part, by Mr,
Clarence Day, Junior, of New York, for whose careful,
untechaical comments I am especially grateful.

WILLIAM

HAVEN, April 7,

Acknowledgment. — The editor of Mind has kindly allowed
me to make use (in part five and in the last appendix) of
parts of an article on " The meaning of mysticism " published
in January, 1912. Two other appendices are due to courtesy
of the editors of The Psychological Bulletin and of The Philo-
sophical Review. These are acknowledged in place. I wish
also here to express thanks to the publishers, who in many
ways and without stint have aided my plans and contributed
to the result.

CONTENTS

PART L RELIGION AS SEEN IN ITS EFFECTS

CHAPTER I

How THE NATURE OF RELIGION MAY BE KNOWN , , 3

Two questions, what religion is and what it is worth, 3. The
* pragmatic approach ' : judging what religion is by what it
does, 4. Can we assume to know what the effects of religion
are? 5. How the hearing of religion on another world is
to be dealt with, 6.

CHAPTER n

THE WORK OF RELIGION IN HISTORY , 11

Religion rather fertile than useful ; ' mother of the arts,' 12.
Emancipation of the arts from religion, 13* And their substi-
tution for religion, 15. Whether any separate place for reli-
gion is left, 20. The perpetual parentage of religion, 23.
Corrective of liberty and of culture : the world of * owns/ 24.
Source of creativity in instinct and in the arts, 25.

CHAPTER III

THE TRAITS OF RELIGION IN PERSONS . . . .27

Every man a connoisseur in judging religion, 27. Traits of
the religious soul, 28. Religion tentatively defined as 'antici-
pated attainment,' 31. Paradox of this definition, and pro-
blem that emerges, 32.

PAET II. RELIGIOUS FEELING AND EELIGIOUS

THEORY

CHAPTER IV

THE RETIREMENT OF THE INTELLECT 37

The general tendency to put reason into the background,
37. Special interest of religion in this change, 38. Various

xxxvi CONTENTS

reasons for it : comparison of religions, 40 ; new views of reli-
gious history, 41. More general reasons : our acquired scientific
instinct, 42. The psychological, biological, and pragmatic cur-
rents, 43 ; the critical current, * Dr.' Locke's view of ideas, 48.
Resulting conception of a religion of feeling, 49. What satis-
faction can tmch religion offer? 51. Altered view of revela-
tion, 53.

CHAPTER V
RELIGION'S DILEMMA IN RESPBCT TO TIIKOBY . . .56

Disadvantages of the religion of feeling, 5(> Religion has
never regarded itself as an affair of feeling, 57, The genuine
dilemma, the 'dialectical illusion/ 59. The dilemma as it
appears in history, scholastic versus mystic, 60. Proposed
solutions, by splitting the mind, by uniting the mind, 62.

CHAPTER VI

THE DESTINY OF FKKLINQ 64

Feeling as conscious instability, 65. Ending in present
knowledge of an object, 66. Equivalence between feeling and
idea in doing work, 69. Friendship as fooling and as creed, 70.
Religious feeling and its cognitive intention, 72. Need reli-
gious ideas be true ? 73 ; or literal ? 75.

CHAPTER VII

How IDKAB OF IDEAS MISRKVRIMNT THEM . . .77

Re'sume' ; the ethics of communicating feeling, 77. Problem
of religious knowledge put an a question of the adequacy of ideas,
78. What an idea i«, 79. The circle as symbol of tho idea, 80.
Can the idea comprehend change? M. Borgmm*H potation,
82. The difference between knowing and reasoning, 87.

CHAPTER VIII

ALLBGHBD FXNITUPK OK IDEAS ..... 90
The infinite an an impossible task for knowledge, 90.
Hiding's view of roligiona knowledge, 91. The* infinite as
an object of all ideas, 9& Tho knowledge of totality, 94.
How knowledge grows, beginning with tho whole, 95. Why
knowledge about the whole is procarioun, 97* Advantage of
the child, 98. Religion and science, 99.

CONTENTS xxxvii

CHAPTER IX

THE RETREAT INTO SUBJECTIVITY 100

Denial of predicates does not make an idea negative, 101.
Nor reduce it to a feeling, 102. The growth of Arts making
literal truth in religion possible, 103. Necessary simplic-
ity of whole-knowledge, 104. Mystical methods of religious
insight, appeals to subconsciousness and instinct, involve no
retreat into subjectivity, 105.

CHAPTER X

THE IDEA-WORLD IN ITS AIM TOWARD FREEDOM FROM

FEELING 109

Tendency of idea to lose vital connection with feeling, 109.
The ideal of independence, 110. The permanent idea^-world,
111. The theoretical attitude, 112. Attempt to explain
away the theoretical attitude as a practical development,
115. Failure of the action-theory in this attempt, 117.
Ideas lodge their meanings in a ' region of indifference,' 118 ;
Nature or substance, 119. Our interest in substance is orig-
inal, 120 ; not derived from other interest, 122.

CHAPTER XI

IDEA IN ORGANIC UNION WITH FEELING .... 124

Interests and values seem ultimate facts, 125. Yet require
to be explained, 126. They depend in part upon the ' apper-
ceptive mass,' 127 ; the idea-resource, 129. Theory of the
dependence of values upon the whole-idea, 130. Illustrated
in the growth of values, 132 ; in the value of personality, 134 ;
in love, 135 ; and altruism, 136. How theory, and especially
religious theory, determines the value-level of consciousness,
and thereby all feeling, 136.

CHAPTER XH

THE WILL AS A MAKER OF TRUTH 139

The idea that religious truth may belong to the unfinished
parts of reality, 140 ; and so be a function of the will, 144.
The poetry of the Orient versus the literality of the West in
religion, 149. Loyalty implies necessity, 152. Our creativ-
ity is derivative, 154. Religious truth must be founded on
experience, therefore on reason also, 154.

NOTE ON PRAGMATIC IDEALISM 157

xxxviii CONTENTS

PAET III. THE NEED OF GOD
PBELDCQTABY NOTE 165

CHAPTER XIII

THE NEED OF UNITY: MONISM AS BEARING ON OPTIMISM . 166

No optimism without some unity, 167 ; beneath the surface
of experience, 168. Unities too feeble for optimism, 169.
Unities of world powers and problems, 172. The view that
evil is less real than good, 174. The scientific reaction to
evil; justice versus a moral monism, 17ft. Monism and re-
sponsibility, 177. Residual pluralism in the materials of his-
tory, 179.

CHAPTER XIV

THE NEED OF AN ABSOLUTE : REFLECTIONS ON ITS PJ&AOTI-

CAL WORTH 183

Indictment of the Absolute, 184. Not an object of worship,
185. Use of the changeless, 187. The two premisses of action,
190. Does the Absolute answer the questions that lead to it ?
— the epistemologist's question, 191 ; the moralist's question,
193 ; the metaphysician's question, 194 ; the question of reli-
gion, 195. How form may matter, 197 ; the irrelevant uni-
versal may do work, 199. Consciousness as something which
makes differences, 201. Its absolute object a necessary con-
dition of this work, 203.

CHAPTER XV

THE NEED OF A GOD 207

McTaggart's critical estimate of the probable worth of
what God does, 208 ; of what God is, 214. The futility of
probabilities here, 214. The worth of God must also be found
in experience, 215. Our happiness depends on openness to
experience, 217; and this, in turn, on the possibility of trans-
muting evil, 218. Experiences of this transmutation, 220.
The logic of a supreme power, 221 ; applied to th^ idea of a
supreme power over evil, 222. How religious experience
seems to meet these conditions, 224. But a finite God is of no
worth, 225.

CONTENTS

PART IV. HOW MEN KNOW GOD

CHAPTER XVI

THE ORIGINAL SOURCES OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD . 229

Experience and tradition, 229. Nature and social experi-
ence as mediators of God, 230. Not ultimate sources, 233.
The knowledge of ignorance, 235 ; of mystery, 236 ; of the
presence of another knower, 237. Religion the source of alien-
ation from the world, as well as its remedy, 238.

CHAPTER XVII

THE KNOWLEDGE OF OTHER MINDS THAN OUR OWN - 241

Three classes of objects, and the organs for knowing
them, 241. Elusiveness of social knowledge, 243. Various
ways of accounting for our knowledge of other minds : by
criteria, 246 ; by response, 248 ; by acknowledgment, 250.
Assumptions common to all these ways, 250. The trilemma
of knowledge, 251.

CHAPTER XVIH

SUCH KNOWLEDGE AS WE COULD DESIRE .... 255

We have no desire to know other mind except as engaged
in nature, 255. The ideal of communicating without physi-
cal media, telepathy, 256. Why this ideal is plausible, 257.
Knowledge of other mind in its objects, 260 ; in its body, 262.
How would the immediate presence of another mind differ
from experience as it is? 265.

CHAPTER XIX

THAT KNOWLEDGE WE HAVE 268

Theory that experience of nature and social experience are
inseparable, 269. Implying that social experience is continu-
ous, 270. And without independent beginning, 271. The
actuality of social experience, 274. Might it be a mere
ideal ? 275. Three difficulties in recognizing the experience,
279. The difficulty of social verification, 279.

x! CONTENTS

CHAPTER XX

OUR NATURAL REALISM AND REALISM ABSOLUTE . . 282

Natural realism excludes social experience, 282. Nature
is objective, but objectivity requires and admits explanation,
284. Our dependence upon nature interpreted in terms of
creation, not causation, 286 , and creation in terms of com-
munication, 288. Realism and idealism, 290.

CHAPTER XXI

THE GOD OF NATURE AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF MAN . 291

Problem of identifying the fundamental social object, 291.
Is it a collective object ? 292. It must be a single self, self-
conscious and wholly active, 293-5. Proximate shapes taken
by this experience in consciousness, 295. The experience of
God making human social experience possible, 297. The re-
gion of community of consciousness, 298 ; solitary selfhood
an acquisition, 299.

CHAPTER XXII

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD 301

Resume* of results ; the literalness of religious experience,
301. What is a proof, in case of an object of experience ?
303. Ways of proving God ; their starting-point, the reality
of nature, 305. Valid proof must interpret the history of
experience, 307. The dialectic of experience which leads to
the God-idea, 308. The reality of this idea, 310. Valid and
invalid forms of the ontological argument, 313*

CHAPTER XXIII

DEVELOPMENT OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD . . . 317

Merits and defects of animism, 317. Advance from spirits
to gods, 318. Qualities of a god, 319. How the knowledge
of God grows, 321. God as one and as many, 324. Prema-
ture monotheisms, 325. God as near and as remote, 326.
God as moral and as amoral, 330. God aa personal and as
impersonal, 332.

CONTENTS xK

PAET V. WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

CHAPTER XXIV

THOUGHT AND WORSHIP 341

Worship as the sphere of the will, 341 ; how different from
philosophic contemplation, 342. As seen in history, 344.
What is the essential part of rite ? 347. Mystics true and false,
349.

NOTE ON THE MEAOTNTG OP MYSTICISM .... 350

CHAPTER XXV

PRELIMINARY DOUBTS OF THE WORTH OF WORSHIP . . 356

Prejudices against the worth of special acts of worship, 356.
Presumptions in favor of the worth of prayer, 358. The na-
ture of spiritual ambition, 359. A quest of self knowledge,
360 ; of knowledge of reality, 362 ; of the new and untried,
363. Worship as an essay in detachment, 365. The love of
God explained by what it is not, 366.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE MYSTIC'S PREPARATION: THE NEGATIVE PATH . . 369

Prayer as exercise of a special faculty, 370. Physical pre-
paration, 372. 'Purgation,' 373; the casuistry of self-sup-
pression, 374. 'Meditation/ 376; its passing objects, 379.
Passivity, 382; its paradoxical character, 383. Summary
view of preparation, 387

CHAPTER XXVH

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYSTICISM 389

Does mystic experience come within the scope of psychology,
390. The significance of its transiency, 391. Characteris-
tics of mystic psychology : (1) Rhythm, 392. Not identical
with oscillation of vital tone, 393 ; nor an abnormal alternation,
395. Organic analogies, 396. (2) Disconnection, 397. A
practical principle which suspends rationality, 399 ; and pre-
cedes conventionality, 401. (3) Solitude, 402. Its danger and
its importance, 403. Mysticism the redemption of solitude, 404.

2dii CONTENTS

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYSTICISM : THE PRINCIPLE OF ALTER-
NATION .... 405

The principle of alternation versus the pursuit of concreted
good, 406. Alternation between whole and part in the tem-
poral work of thought and will, 407. The necessity for al-
ternation found in the nature of voluntary attention, 412.
Symptoms of spiritual fatigue, 415. Reversal from work to
pleasure and worship, 418. Relation of worship to pleasure,
etc., 419. The mystic's motive, 422. The failure of perma-
nent worship, 425. Major rhythm of life, 427.

CHAPTER XXIX

PRAYER AND ITS ANSWER 428

Mystic experience as answer to prayer, 428. The com-
moner forms of mystic experience, 428. The realization of
the uniqueness of time, 429. The discovery of oneself as
individual, 430. The discovery of another self as individ-
ual, 431. Nature of love, 433. Perception of the whole as
individual, the love of God, 433. The permanent meaning
of prayer, 436. The religious right, 437. The sanctions of
worship, 439.

CONTENTS xliii

PART VI. THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

PRELIMINARY NOTE 44S

CHAPTER XXX

PECULIAR KNOWLEDGE AND CERTAINTY: REVELATION AND

DOGMA 44?

The mystic is first an original knower of old truth, 448.
Why he regards this truth as of general interest, 449. The
'that' as prior to the 'what,' 453. Infallihility versus its
content, 455. The incidental fruitfulness of his revelation,
457. Origin of special dogmas, 458. The errors of dogma,
459.

CHAPTER XXXI

THE CREATIVITY OF RELIGION: THEORY OF INSPIRATION . 462

Creativity has its logic, 462. The resistance to innovation,
the group-form of conscious systems, 463. Examples of the
creative event, 466. Creation dependent upon reflexion, 470.
How is reflexion possible ? 472. Partial reflexion depend-
ent upon total reflexion, which is contained in worship, 4/4.
Induction akin to reflexion, 475. Observation, genius, 476.
Novelty and continuity of consciousness, 478. Limitation
overcoming itself, 481.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS 485

The problem of particular fortune, 485. Happiness de-
taching itself from particular things, 486. Doctrine of the
inner control of happiness, 488. Psychological nature of un-
happiness, 491. Conditions of happiness, 492. Paradoxical
attitudes towards pain and defeat, 493. Stoicism ancient
and modern, 495- Altruism, 497. Altruism not sufficient,
500. Need of prophetic consciousness, 503. Anticipations
of prophecy in common experience, 505. The cost of pro-
phetic power, 509. Prophecy and mystic experience, 512.
Religion and the historic virtues, 512.

xhv CONTENTS

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE UNIFYING OF HISTORY 515

The external conditions for religious confidence, 516. The
prophetic will tends to create the conditions for its own suc-
cess, 517. Bringing into history a structure like that of nature,
518. The meaning of the religious institution, 519. The
problem of positive religion, 520. Positive religion and the
State, 520. The need for positive religion ; the actual founda-
tions of faith, 523.

EXPLANATORY NOTES AND ESSAYS

1. NOTE ON THE SUBCONSCIOUS 527

2. THE RELATIONS BETWEEN IDEA AND VALUE UNDER-

STOOD THROUGH BlOLOGY 539

3. THE KNOWLEDGE OF INDEPENDENT REALITY . . . 558

4. NOTE ON LEUBA'S THEORY OF THE NATURE OF THE

MYSTIC'S LOVE OF GOD 574

INDEX . ... , ...... 679

PAET I
RELIGION AS SEEN IN ITS EFFECTS

CHAPTER I

HOW THE NATURE OF RELIGION MAT BE
KNOWN

WE are proposing to reach some definite conclusion
about the nature and worth of religion — what
it consists of in the way of experience, belief, and action;
what comes of it in the way of support, outlook, and actual
productiveness. As to the nature of religion, we are pro-
posing especially to enquire how much it is concerned
with theoretical propositions to be believed, metaphysical
assertions, doctrines about unseen things and things past
and to come — in short, how far the intellect is involved ;
how far, on the other hand, religion appeals to some-
thing in us deeper than intellect, — to faith, to feeling,
to the subconscious, to the instinctive, to the essential
will. Certainly, in our own time, the worth of intellect
in religion is much discredited ; various ways are sug-
gested as to how we may take our creeds without taking
them literally — as figurative or symbolic expressions of
truths that cannot be exactly formulated, as postulates
whose significance is primarily moral, as declarations of
value, as determinations of the will. And yet one seems
to require literality at some point in his creed ; we wish
to bring our religion at least into the same universe
with our science (whose propositions are all ' literal ')
and to have them speak with the same voice when they
verge, as at their limits they do verge, upon the same

4: RELIGION" AS SEEN IN ITS EFFECTS

great questions of human destiny. Further, we do not
believe that either science or religion is irrelevant to con-
duct, and when they bear upon the same fundamental
issues of practice we wish to see a fair understanding
between them. We are open to the opinion that reli-
gion does in some way take us beyond reason, and that
religious truth must in some measure be clothed in sym-
bols ; but we are not open to believe that reason and
our beyond-reason are separate and independent func-
tions. As surely as any one person rides one consecu-
tive route of experience through time, so surely must
all the truth that belongs to one person come to the
same court and enter into the same total system of his
world. We are proposing, therefore, to interest our*
selves especially in the parts that reason aud beyond-
reason play in the so-called truths of religion.

And we think that we shall be helped in determining
what religion is by first fixing our attention upon what
religion does, as if religion could best bo seen not by
direct inspection, but in its effects. Not only is it true
that religion is itself an invisible and intangible object,
best discovered as wind — and the spirit generally — are
discovered, in what they move; but also, our interest in
religion is due to an opinion of its value, or at any rate
of its actual influence in the world, so that our identifi-
cation of it and understanding of it are guided by these
supposed consequences. This, we may say, is a pragmatic
approach to our subject; and it will have the advantage
of leaving open the question what importance theoret-
ical propositions may have in religion ; — it is possible,
for instance, that the feelings may prove to be the work-
ing part of religion and the ideas a matter of derivative

THE NATURE OF RELIGION 5

importance. But there are serious objections to this
way of learning the nature of religion.

The first is that we shall be moving in a circle. The
value of religion is half of our problem, perhaps the
larger half ; can we assume that we already know the
value and works of religion as a guide to the knowledge
of its nature, and then treat its nature as a source of the
knowledge of its works? I only answer this objection
by accepting it. In any living subject we have to assume
that we already know something as a capital whereby
to win a wider and more exact knowledge. And it is the
usual procedure of science to use the phenomena as a
means of winning a formula for the ' things', and the for-
mula in turn as a means of discovering further phenom-
ena. This circle, or as I prefer to put it, this alterna-
tion between inner and outer, is our own way of life,
and the way of all knowledge.

The second objection is more specific. It is that the
chief works of religion are as invisible and conjectural
as religion itself, since they belong to another world
than this. No historic religion has pretended to recom-
mend itself to men solely on the ground of its value for
the present life and social order. Most developed reli-
gions, on the contrary, insist on the comparative worth-
lessness of these goods, make it a point to draw away
our attention and affections from them, and assert that
the treasures to which they would introduce us are else-
where. If such religions render distinct service to human
society, it is an incidental service. The most widely in-
fluential of religions, Buddhism, must by its own logic
regard itself a failure in so far as it tends in any way
to make this present existence, whether personal, social,

6 RELIGION AS SEEN IN ITS EFFECTS

or political, more attractive. And B uddhism is not alone
in this deprecation of things present.1 Any attempt,
therefore, to judge religion pragmatically, that is, by its
effects in human experience, would seem to promise little
to the point : at best, its estimate is threatened by
defective proportion.

Nevertheless, it is true that religion has, for the most
part, regarded itself as ministering to the welfare of two
worlds, and not of one only. It seems to have gained a
foothold on this planet originally by combining its in-
visible interests (so immensely real to the imaginative
animal) with other interests of a practical and immedi-
ate nature. The gods were Powers, perceptible in field,
water-course, and fruit ; in cloud, in battle, and in bodily
health or disease — though their great historical exploits
may have belonged to regions behind the sun. Penal-
ties visited upon the profane were physical as well as
metaphysical; to be "cut off from fire and water"
meant pain, probably death, to the body as well as to
the social nature and the souL And with the growing
belief that the other world, whatever it bo, is not a
jealous rival of this present, but at least in relations of

1 Neither Schopenhauer's nor Rousseau's interpretation of Chris-*
tianity will be acceptable to everybody. But these words from The Social
Contract are not all false; and may remind us how recently it has be-
come absurd to take their view as full truth. " Christianity is an entirely
spiritual religion, concerned solely with heavenly things ; tho Christian's
country is not of this world. He does his duty, it is true ; but he does it
with a profound indifference as to the good or ill success of his endeavors.
Provided that he has nothing to reproach himfielf with, it matters little
to him whether all goes well or ill here below. If the State flourishes, he
scarcely dares to enjoy the public felicity. If the State declines, he
blesses the hand of God which lies heavy on his people." — Book iv,
ch. viii.

THE NATURE OP RELIGION 7

friendliness and perhaps of organic union with it, the
impression deepens in our common consciousness that
the fruits by which true religion is to be known are
such as ripen in part before our eyes. By virtue of
some harmony of nature in the two worlds, nothing
which is profitable in the one can, we believe, be wholly
noxious in the other. And by virtue of some actual
intercourse between heaven and earth, the effects of
salvation may echo back and be noted in moral advance-
ment, economic welfare, and the success of armies. Our
increasing confidence that what we bind on earth is
likewise bound in heaven, and that what we regard as
good here is esteemed there in the same sense, makes
it necessary for religion to submit to a type of measure-
ment that must once have seemed unspeakably worldly
and irrelevant. In proportion as any form of religion
hinders, or fails to promote, what we regard as c welfare'
— that form is judged false : in no religion is authority
now so far prior to social judgment that it could again
impose upon Europe the human sacrifice or the sacred
prostitution. When we now say that God loves men,
we mean in part that God loves what we love; and
when we refer to the will of God, we think we know
that will chiefly through our knowledge of the condi-
tions of social soundness and progress. We have all but
lost our power to believe in the great reversal with which
religious enthusiasm would once unhesitatingly confront
any confessed ambition.

To be more definite, a certain large part of that
primitive Other-world has been reclaimed as an integral
part of this sphere of things. I do not mean simply
that human ambitions have become capable of more

8 RELIGION AS SEEN IN ITS EFFECTS

idealism ; so that the old contrast between the present
and the beyond is largely reproduced in the contrast
between the narrower and the wider interest, the self-
seeking desires and the love of mankind. I mean that
we have learned something of the sources of the older
ideas about the Other-world ; and that we can identify
at least some of that Other- world with the human mind
itself. For the human mind stands in direct contrast
with nature ; is somehow superior to nature, including
it as in some god-realm remote yet intimate, a world
of another sort. To the ancient beginner in self-know-
ledge, unfurnished with psychological ideas and unac-
quainted with the mysteries of introspection, his own
mind appears to him — can only appear to him — as
a part of supernature. He has no way to express what
goes on within him save in objective terms, imaginatively
chosen and projected. The gods who in ordeal choked
the liar, showed themselves to the youth at initiation,
who inspired the dance, swung-up the rage of fighting
to omnipotence point, answered many a prayer, were in
some part functions of his own soul — or of his sub-
soul. Commands of the deity revealed to shaman and
priest, — we may fairly call them instinctive forebod-
ings of social good and evil, and say that supernature
here is but remoter nature, impressing itself upon the
sense of the keener-strung members of the race. It is
simply the higher mental process that is read as a voice
from another world.

So also with every new idea, with every product of
" inspiration " : those to whom at first, and rarely, such
inbursts of reflexive insight came with definiteness and
power could not have done otherwise than refer them

THE NATURE OF RELIGION 9

to a supernatural source. Moments of deeper thought
and intenser fancy distinguished ahove the common-
place of existence, moments of imagination and inven-
tion, — these moments have in all ages struck upon the
mind as from a world beyond that of the visible career.
No one upon whom reflection, the awareness of his own
solitary self, has broken as an epoch in experience with
the effect at once of revelation and command, can fail
to understand how those early spokesmen of the spirit
believed themselves both passive and at the same time
more than human in the hours of their elevation ; and
how in declaring themselves media for the utterance of
sacred oracles they were but recognizing that impera-
tive impulse which an intense conviction always imposes
upon the soul. The primitive prophet must have re-
garded the mystery of his insight with as much wonder
and reverence as its expression would excite in those
around him. Yet here also we are now able to recog-
nize in large measure the natural operations of our own
minds, conscious and subconscious.

In such ways as this much of the language of classic
religion can be interpreted, and so much of the su-
pernatural thereby naturalized, that we may question
whether any significant part of the Other-world is left:
to be considered in a theory of religion.

For my part, I do not accept the notion that the
Other-world can be wholly transferred to the present
by these interpretations. There remains to me some-
thing literal in the supernature of the most material
and credulous savage. I stand with him in the belief
that religion would vanish if the whole tale of its value
were shifted to the sphere of human affairs, however

10 RELIGION AS SEEN IN ITS EFFECTS

psychically or spiritually understood. But I accept the
interpretations, as far as they can go. They prove
enough to justify our method. They show an inter*
mixture, anastomosis, and analogy between the Other-
world and this, so thorough that if we begin our study
of religion by a rough survey of its working in our social
structure and history we shall not go wide of the mark.
Whatever other knowledge we might gain of religion,
there could be no complete understanding unless it were
also known in its bearing upon those interests we call
humanistic.

CHAPTEE II

THE WORK OF RELIGION IN HISTORY

IF we undertake to judge what religion is by what
religion has done in history, some data are conspicu-
ous, others obscure, — little is of sure purport. Students
of Kulturgeschichte are more ready than they were to
credit religion with certain definite achievements and
services, especially at the beginning, in the rude busi-
ness of nation-making, law-making, mind-making.1 But
as religion ceases to be the one salient social force its re-
sults mingle with the effects of other factors ; clear trac-
ing of the causal nerve is difficult. Prom the record, vast
and igneous as it is, there appears also a certain con-
tradictoriness in the effects of religion. It is credited
with works of government, charged with works of war,
— it sheds blood as generously as it promotes brother-
hood. Religion has fostered everything valuable to man
and has obstructed everything: it has welded states
and disintegrated them ; it has rescued races and it has
oppressed them, destroyed them, condemned them to
perpetual wandering and outlawry. It has raised the
value of human life, and it has depressed the esteem of
that life almost to the point of vanishing ; it has hon-
ored womanhood, it has slandered marriage. Here is
an energy of huge potency but of ambiguous character.
Prom such a survey but one uncontradicted impression
1 See Lippert, Bagehot, Fustel de Coulanges, Kidd, Hobhouse, etc.

12 RELIGION AS SEEN IN ITS EFFECTS

emerges : the thing has been radical ; it has had some
grip upon the original instincts of human nature ; it has
known how to rule and to swirl into its own vortex all the
currents of love, of hunger, and of self-defense; and it
has been able to put these severally and together under
its feet. It is this dynamic aspect of religion, an in-
finite resource, which has appealed to capable political
intelligence since the days of Roman, perhaps of Per-
sian, imperial policy ; and it is this same aspect which
appeals now to the scientist of society, whose eye is
quick for usable elements of public power.

But religion, though a social force of unknown mag-
nitude, has never been tamed to harness by statesman,
diplomat, or sociologue : the word ' useful * hardly ap-
plies to it. Unlike the forces of nature, it is not now
better known and more manageable for having been
long dealt with. Statecraft has learned to fear it rather
than to tamper with it ; and having once hotly sought
alliance now everywhere seeks separation. A thing so
root-mighty cannot fail to excite the lust for power ;
but the exploiter has been at every point of contact
stunned back by a touch of the uncontrollable. It is as
if man's reason were trying to make bargains with man's
insanity. As a social force, the laios of religious caus-
ality have not been discovered.

And in fact, from the side of its deeds in history
religion remains a mystery. Its career is the swath of
an agency immense, invisible, paradoxical. If its works
are patent, they no more reveal its character than they
becloud it. But the surface of historic fact which yields
so little to an external inspection and use may respond
more quickly to a simple hypothesis* What I have to

THE WOKK OF RELIGION IN HISTORY 13

propose is indeed something less than a theory at first,
a rather unpromising tool, a figure of speech both com-
monplace and faulty. It is this. The effect of religion
in history appears most comprehensible to me when I
regard it not primarily as an actor but as a parent,
a parent whose deeds are far less important than her
progeny, and whose most notable activity is put forth
only in course of her dealings with them. The distinc-
tion between utility and fertility runs throughout na-
ture. It is a distinction which amounts to an incompat-
ibility at some points in vital economy: it seems necessary
that at these points life must choose between the useful
and the fertile, so that the secret of the survival of many
an apparently idle organ or social member is caught
only in the rare moments of its creative action. It is
vaguely, the distinction between worker and queen,
leaf and blossom, male and female, science and fine art.
Utility belongs to the middle things in creation, fertility
to the extremes — the ugly, the rejected, the consum-
mate, the perfect — to those things whereunto creation
runs as to hopeless failure or to final achievement; and
both the apparent failure and the apparent finality are
denied in the moment when they become fertile. If
the function of religion in the world should prove to
be of the fertile rather than of the useful sort, the
curiously paradoxical character of its overt deeds is in
some measure accounted for.

Allow me to assert without detailed evidence that all
the arts of common life owe their present status and
vitality to some sojourn within the historic body of reli-
gion ; that there is little in what we call culture which has
not at some time been a purely religious function, such as

14 RELIGION AS SEEN IN ITS EFFECTS

dancing, legislation, ceremony, science, music, philos-
ophy, moral control. I shall not enquire whether some of
these human interests — which for the sake of simplicity
I shall hereafter refer to in sum as "the Arts" — have
not had independent beginnings, as for example ethical
and legislative ideas may have had; for whenever this
has been the case, the art in question has later found
its way to amalgamation with religion, and has from
this absorption emerged with a new character and an-
imus. Religion, I shall say, according to this vague fig-
ure, is the mother of the Arts : this is its pragmatic
place in the history of mankind and of culture.

If this figure is substantially right, the inference from
the fruits of religion to the nature of religion itself will
be more substantial and intimate than the inference
from various effects to their cause, or from scattered
deeds to the agent of them. For something of religion
itself would have been communicated to its offspring,
and might in all likelihood be recognized there. In at-
taining their majority, the children have not forgone
the quality of the parent : they are still of her stock and
substance.

It is true that in their successive struggles for eman-
cipation, as in all adolescence, they were less conscious
of their likeness to their parent than of their differ-
ence, and of the smothering necessity for independent
fare and fortune. They have filled the air of Greek
and modern times with cries to which we have become
accustomed : " Art for art's sake," " Science for science's
sake," « Right for right's sake," "Humanity for hu-
manity's sake," and the rest — all of them heartily po-

THE WORK OF RELIGION IN HISTORY 15

lemic against the notion that they exist for any god's
sake. But note the stages of their growth to maturity.
Originally, an Art, no matter which one — architecture,
mensuration, law-giving, music — is regarded as a di-
rect manifestation of the divine, subject to divine pur-
poses only ; then it is shown to be amenable to human
control, and makes good its claim, as we have said, to
serve as an independent human interest $ later on, the
question of its divinity or humanity loses venom, and it
is acknowledged a free art, having a province in either
sacred or secular subjects ; finally, when all the causes
for warfare have been won, the old spirit of kinship re-
sumes sway, and someone sets up the cry that the art in
question is really the essence of religion! No recent
century has lacked men of weight who are prepared to
discard the old progenetrix, and to assert with vigor
that their religion, and quite possibly all religion, is
now and hereafter identified with the cult of beauty, or
of truth, or of righteousness, or of human good, or of
all together.

Perhaps it is not too much to say that these several
ingredients of our spiritual life constitute now for the
world the bulk of what religion it lives by. At the be-
ginning of history, religion is the whole of culture ; at
its end, it may seem, culture is the whole of religion.
This relationship must be looked at somewhat closely.

1C RELIGION AS SEEN IN ITS EFFECTS

Progressive historical subtraction, such as religion
has been subject to in the maturing of the arts, looks
like progressive analysis; and as this analysis continues
the presumption grows that it approaches completion.
Knowing as we do that all life moves toward the ex-
plicit from the hidden, it is more than a plausible hy-
pothesis that religion has been simply the crude integral
and germ of all these clearer essences ; that her life
has been prophetic and preparatory, her fertility is
exhausted, her separate role is now outplayed. This im-
pression is enforced by the observation that each of
these arts fulfills in a substantial way the traditional
functions of the older cult. Each one — poetry, or
thought, or social service — has its type of inspira-
tion upon which its devotee depends; each has its
way of saving men from sensuality and selfishness ; in
each of them, this salvation is by way of self-sacrifice
and devotion ; and each of them is an imperishable cause,
greater than individual aims, invisible and calling for a
launch offaithy — yet for the same reasons more per-
manent than personal and visible things, a genuine
supernatural order, capable of conferring a valid im-
mortality upon the good and faithful servant. If there
is anything in an identity of predicates, the identi-
fication of subjects seems irresistible. Religion is one
with the Arts; it is her immortality to continue her
life in them.

If we ask which of these causes contains the most of
religion, the trend of the times furnishes an answer, as
it were by instinct. It has frequently been observed that
these several ideals or ' causes* have a remarkable power
(due no doubt to their family likeness) to include and

THE WORK OF RELIGION IN HISTORY 17

involve each other: the worship o£ beauty, for instance,
carries with it normally a regard for the requirements
of truth and sympathy, and conversely. We can see how
any one of these, thoroughly worked out, might be suf-
ficient for all : while still any one of them taken alone,
as men are, would be likely to give life a skewed pro-
portion in some places, since the supposed working-out
is never finished — the artist may never arrive at a com-
plete amalgamation of the moral with the beautiful, the
moralist never fully unite grace and harmony with his
ideal of right. It is the cult of social service that seems
to be the most naturally comprehensive, and to engage
most fully the whole religious nature of man. It tends
at the present moment somewhat to displace the rest,
and to suck up the enthusiasm of the new youth. It
gives a better proportion : it can unite with beauty, but
at a rate which does not part men from the actual dirt
and disarray of social factsj it can unite with truth, but
if it is a matter of the social good, or the religious edu-
cation of children, or the like, — well, truth also can stand
in its due order and degree, it may seem. But no matter
which one of the offspring of religion is most appealing
at any time ; religion is exhausted into no one, — into
nothing less than the totality of her children . The point
is, that this totality, however found, seems an equivalent
for passing religion.

A corroboration of this view may be found in the dis*
tribution of religion in the world, as compared with the
distribution of the Arts. Where the Arts thrive as sep-
arate interests, religion is feeble. The zealous religion
of to-day is at home in the life of the peasantry, of the
bourgeoisie, — wherever life is still simple and unified.

18 RELIGION AS SEEN IN ITS EFFECTS

For here it is still the whole of men's art, the whole of
their literature, their philosophy, their poetry and their
music : it is still the crude integral of their higher life,
and should they lose it they would lose all that distin-
guishes their existence.1 In so far and fast as they grow
into possession of more individual forms of these same
values they incline to let the separate practice of reli-
gion lapse.1 Is it not fair to say that there are few of
the developed individuals of our time who with either
a powerful enthusiasm for a single branch of art, or a
well-balanced appreciation of what we call our culture,
retain in addition a vigorous religious life as a special
direction of attention?

If we accept this theory of the function of religion
in history and of its destiny to merge itself with the
Arts, we can read with greater understanding the curious
tale of religion's antagonism to progress, its inertia, ob-
struction, conservatism. We can readily put ourselves
into the psychological position of the religious partisan,
in whose consciousness the spirits of the several Arts
dwell undistinguished, and all of whose inspiration has
been indeed inseparable from his piety. We shall see it
as inevitable that when the natural processes of growth
and division have threatened to take away one by one
architecture and sculpture, science and political control,
from the sacred auspices under which they took their
shape, it has seemed from the standpoint of the priest

1 Hdffding remarks, though with a different theory for the case,
''The more men are absorbed in the business of self-maintenance, or the
more they are given up to intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical interests, the
more the strictly religious interest falls into the background — if indeed
it does not entirely disappear." Philosophy of Religion, p. 111.

THE WORK OF RELIGION IN HISTORY 19

that these Arts were being cut loose from the source not
only of their inspiration but of their life ; and as though
violence were being done not more to the priesthood or
to the god than to the wayward Art itself and to the
world beyond which fostered it. However much of
6 priestcraft/ class-interest, and the like has mingled with
these motives in the history of religious obstruction,
there is a residuum of the genuine tragedy of all growth,
so that the story of culture must henceforth be told not
as a story of "warfare between science and religion,"
but as an infinitely human tale of growing asunder, with
all the rending of veritable bonds and loyalties on both
sides that such events have always involved.

While, then, we understand the historic attitude of
religion to these changes, as dispassionate observers we
must regard the process of taking human possession of
any art as an advance; and hence as the necessary des-
tiny of whatever religion contains, until all is free. The
change is precisely analogous to the well-known psy-
chological process of getting a clear concept or expres-
sion for what has been lurking in the mind as a feeling,
unsatisfactory, haunting, mysterious, tantalizing. Once
the adequate expression is hit upon, the cloudy fringes
of the experience are lifted; the hovering sense of the
infinite and ineffable disappear together with the hu-
miliating consciousness of impotence: an ' idea ' is born,
and the human self is in possession. Such must be the
career of all influxes to the spirit. And once the various
possible directions of mental groping have been differ-
entiated and established in our common life, the sepa-
rate mission of religion is at an end.

20 RELIGION AS SEEN IN ITS EFFECTS

Religion clothes itself to-day, indeed, in all the Arts,
and in philosophy ; but beneath these garments, what
is there left to worship — unless, perchance, history it-
self ? Instituted religion appears among us as a survival,
decked out in relics of Arts that have won their freedom.
Or, let us rather say, it is the spirit of the sacred past
which organizes and sanctifies these relics, providing a
place where the Zeitgeist may worship at the shrine of
its own emancipation. Keligion, as a separate object of
attention, is an exhausted parent, cherished in her de-
cay through some sentiment of recognizance by the Arts
she has nourished, — the receiver, but no longer the
giver of life.

The view of religion above sketched is a view more
often felt than professed. It represents an argument
more often found in men's lives than on their lips : sug-
gested more by the tendencies of social movement than
by any theories that are acknowledged among us. It is
well to become expressly conscious of these facts of the
progressive substitution of Art for religion, and of the
view of religion which they imply. We have now to say
what we think of this view.

So much must be admitted : that at every point of
progress religion is a sort of remainder, — the residual
inspiration of human life. And at each stage of sub-
traction, it becomes harder to see that there is any fur*
ther residuum. What remains, if anything remains, is
relatively formless, as compared with what has emerged.
It is at a disadvantage for recognition. Especially when
we have eliminated morality and philosophy from the
special ^province of religion, does that province appear

THE WORK OF RELIGION IN HISTORY 21

empty, mystical, barren ; and the position of those who
ignore it may be made correspondingly solid, spiritually
solid. To-day one need be no materialist, no mammonist,
no foe of morality and order, no selfish or unspiritual
mind, to dispense with the separate practice of religion ;
it is precisely the humane and the ideal of temper, men
of character and good- will, who by common consent and
their own are likely to excuse themselves from the form,
assuming that they have the substance — this is the most
ominous fact that religion, as a distinctive thing in the
world, has now to face. And rather than face it, many
of her supporters hasten to save a weakening cause by
accepting the identification — or near-identification —
of religion with some Art — especially with morality or
with human service. It is necessary at the outset of our
work, in the interest of simple clearness, to recognize
this tendency for what it is — a confusion and a breach
of faith. Let religion vanish, if it is to vanish : but
know that it is impossible — in any sense sanctioned
by history, or faith, or clear reason — that religion should
be merged with any Art, or with all Arts. The position
of religion in the world is, and has been, unique ; and
with the preservation of this distinction its very nature
is bound up. The very work done by religion in the
course of history has depended — despite her union
with the Arts — on the clear eminence, above all her
contact with affairs, of a summit which is No-art and
touched by no Art.

What the inner nature of the unique element in religion
maybe, our present view of religion does not and need not
show. Since it is No-art (and Art as we mean it includes
everything that at any time is wholly naturalized and

22 RELIGION AS SEEN IN ITS EFFECTS

humanly possessed) it will be for any time somehow un-

J S. I v

possessed and problematical, and may for the present be
so to us. What our view of the effectiveness of religion
in history does at once make evident as to its nature is —
first, its necessary distinction; second, its necessary su-
premacy. These characters though external have been
so essential to its fruitf ulness, as to justify the statement
that without them religion is not religion. A merged
religion and a negligible or subordinate religion are no re-
ligion. If the importance of religion diminishes as Art
progresses, religion must disappear. If there is any other
way of life, if any other cause can act as a passable substi-
tute, the case of special religion is lost. It is lost from the
side of Art, because every Art is better off free, on its
own ground, unencumbered by the peculiar apparatus
and terminology of religion. It is lost from the side of
life, because religion as a separate thing is the most diffi-
cult and expensive of all means to an end. But chiefly, it
is lost from the ground of its own character, and the qual-
ities which alone have given it its hold upon the human
mind. Keligion is already gone when it is weighed with
or subordinated to some other and surer value. It can
only be held to on the supposition that it is necessary.
Shorn of its pride, its intolerance of rivals, its scorn of
comparison, it is shorn of its honor also, and there*
with of all that defines its value. Only that religion can
hold attention which is always younger than the youngest
of her children, more fruitf ulf or what she has spent, more
needful for the continued life of the Arts than for their
inception.

THE WORK OF RELIGION IN HISTORY 23

It is here chiefly that our figure is defective. For the
work o£ religion is a perpetual parentage ; the status of
the Arts is a perpetual dependence. All independence
is conceptual, approximate, and relative. The inspira-
tion, or breathing, of all the Arts, is, in the final trac-
ing of their " compartments," a breathing of the outer
and unlimited air : communication of this sort with the
Whole, is religion. Or let us say, religion is the func-
tion of in-letting, or osmosis, between the human spirit
and the living tissue of the universe wherein it is eter-
nally carried. If many imagine that their Art is their
religion, it is doubtless so far true, that their religion is
continuous with their Art, and would be truncated and
deformed without it. But their Art, in so far as it is
still capable of creation, is continuous with their reli-
gion — a vital union which depends strangely enough
on the consciously-held distinction between them.

Is our present age an age of originality, or is it rather
an age in which Art gnaws its nails for sustenance ?
this age — in which every Interest has its own head
and its own way as never before ! Freedom to us means
reasonableness ; and reasonableness means that every-
thing is referred to sources of its own kind. Thus, we
refer public effects to public forces, — not to royal
fiat, — and this is political freedom. We refer material
effects to material causes, not to divine or human will,
— and this is scientific freedom. We respect the family
privacy of the different parts or groups of the cosmos,
— thereby each such group is given its freedom. None
but fine-art-considerations shall have an entree to fine-
art-work-shops. The rights of individuals to their own
spheres and provinces, the right to be tried by one's owr

24 RELIGION AS SEEN IN ITS EFFECTS

kind, even to be punished by nothing but the logic of
one's own crime, — we care for these rights, but they
are not by any means the only rights we care for : we
treasure the private rights of Ideas, of Abstractions.
Every Principle has its own belongings, every Concep-
tion has its own circle of Relations which must not be
intruded upon by the unfit and extraneous. It is the
technique of living to learn and feel all these personal
and abstract Owns, — all the proprieties and freedoms,
not to mingle Business with Personalities, not to lug in
Politics when one is in Society, not to test Humor by
canons of Science, still less bring Humor into the con-
templation of Religion. One word is equivalent to our
culture — ' Discrimination/ Yes, there was never so
much freedom in the world as now, i.e., there were
never so many Owns to be learned and respected. But
this world of Owns is a noble mesh of surfaces that
would be closed, but cannot be. It is in some sense
a failure, a necessary and mysterious failure, likely
to die of its tight-held freedoms and independences, its
clear-cut-nesses and non-intrusions. Religion it is that
knows the point of this failure. Religion holds self-
sufficiency in derision ; religion is the comprehensive
irony of the world toward all Owns. In opening every
Art toward itself, it opens each toward every other :
through No-art all Arts become one, and one life
courses through all of them.

Our arts are parcelled out much as we sometimes
parcel out and enumerate human instincts. Every in-
stinct naturally has an art — i.e., a way of finding sat-
isfaction ; on the other hand, every primary art, broadly
speaking, corresponds to, and helps to define ' an in-

THE WORK OF RELIGION IN HISTORY 25

stinct/ But no one can make a satisfactory list of the
instincts, or of the primitive impulses, of man : for in
the human being they have so far mixed and braided
and fused, as their objects have developed, that listing
becomes arbitrary. The truth is, they belong together ;
and in our modes of living find their way together :
love and hunger meet iii the family, hunger and defense
in the civic community, love and defense in the war*
gang. (This absurd list of instincts will serve as well
as another to show the point.) Now in religion all in-
stincts meet. Destined as they are to come to terms
with each other in human society, religion engages
them all, keeps them in yoke together until they make
friends. Just as we found in all Arts the outlines of
religious action, so every instinct, in what it deeply
drives toward, shows the traits of religious aspiration.
The life of an instinct and the continuous inspiration
of the corresponding art are the same thing : creativity
in some sort is what satisfies and alone satisfies every
instinct, and creativity is precisely what religion calls out
in them, in the process of holding them to their own
unity.

Bergson has told us that all originality is derived
from sensation : this is but part of the truth. Origi-
nality is derived from the primitive. Keligion, " the
crude integral of the Arts," is primitive as sensation is
primitive, fundamental to knowledge as sensation is
fundamental to knowledge — at the opposite pole : and
creativity comes not from sensation alone (though not
without sensation), but from sensation warmed and wet
by the sky of religion. And back to mother-earth,
to the cruder mind which knows its own integrity, shall

26 RELIGION AS SEEN IN ITS EFFECTS

we g0> unless in holding to the severalty and freedom
of our Arts and Owns, we are able to hold with equal
strength to that which is other than all of them, the
source of their creativity and the channel of their union.

Herewith, then, I have expressed quite dogmatically
a conviction regarding the function of religion in his-
tory and society, a function which throws some light
upon its nature. Only the completion of our whole task
can bring adequate substance into these wide outlines.
What the process of religion in the mind of man may
be through which these creative results take place, we
have not begun to enquire. We shall come nearer to
religion itself in our next study — the effects of religion
in individual life.

CHAPTER III
THE TRAITS OF RELIGION IN PERSONS

WE know religion when we meet it in persons. We
are in no need of definition to guide our eyes, or
to help in identifying it. We are perpetually seeing its
fruits, or missing them, in our neighbors. We are sen-
sitive even to its shades and degrees ; aware of its more
or less, its depth, its texture, its resistance. Indeed, we
are instinctive connoisseurs on this subject, every son of
Adam, — because religion is a human property, not a
property of culture. An errand-boy can detect as well
as any psychologist the falsetto in an assumed devout-
ness; is as keen to mark the fatal note of economy in an
accent pious from habit ; is cut as quickly by the leap
of the true flame, no matter from what covering.

And this holds good in spite of the fact that a man's
religion is the hiddenest thing in him. Hidden in large
part from himself. Let him try with might and main to
give a true estimate of his own, — his word for it is no
better than mine : the thing is too close to himself to be
well seen by him. But for that very reason our percep-
tion of it in him is conveyed immediately with our sense
of the fiber of the person. It is as if a man's religion
and his personal quality were in large measure inter-
changeable terms. We take our impression of it in-
voluntarily, and this impression becomes one of the
most stubborn of human opinions : if the alternative is

28 RELIGION AS SEEN IN ITS EFFECTS

pressed upon us of doubting a man in whom we have
met this absolute worth, or of doubting an institution
or tradition which damns him on its technicalities, we
may find ourselves loosing our feet from the institution.
In such and such an atheist or doubter of the Trinity
or happy-go-lucky liver we may have caught some deep
flash of the trait we call religious, and we sit strangely
secure in the prospect of his future destiny. The power
of religious dogmas is limited, and their edge slowly
turned, by the unwaivable weight of this court which sits
in permanent judgment upon their judgments.

Our perception of religion, like any other instinctive
perception, can doubtless be sophisticated and work false.
It holds its truth with difficulty in the presence of pre-
judice, theological interest, and passion. Even so, it is
possible to describe in the large the kind of thing
which in persons we pronounce the traits of religion.
The world has not been poor in characters in whom the
quality is present in such abundance as to carry our af-
firmative beyond a doubt ; with these in mind we shall
be able to characterize at least its outward appearance.

That which chiefly marks the religious soul is a fear-
less and original valuation of things. Its judgments
emerge somehow from solitude, as if it had resources
and data of its own sufficient to determine its attitudes
without appeal to the bystander, as if by fresh contact
with truth itself, it were sure of its own justice. It may
treat objects which we pass as ordinary as if they were
not ordinary ; distinguished matters may seem reduced
in its eyes to the commonplace. It lives as if seeing
reality where neither physical eye nor practical judg-

THE TRAITS OF RELIGION IN PERSONS 29

ment see anything; and it makes material sacrifices for
this faith. Its original valuation is seen also in what
it fails to do, equally with what it does. It seems not
to display the common need to escape from some of the
unpleasant facts of experience — to edge away from cer-
tain passages, to hurry through with certain inevitable
others. It behaves as if no present experience could
utterly oppress it, as if indeed all circumstance brought
by history to its share might be received with respect,
almost with deference, as significant and right, not ac-
cidental. It is not as one immune from suffering that
the religious spirit moves in the severer passes of its
career, but as one willing to accept and able to entertain
suffering in the solemn adequacy of its own peculiar
insight.

But this originality and this freedom are strangely
united with an opposite quality, necessity. The certi-
tude of the religious spirit is so poised by an inward bond
that it conveys no impression of personal self-assertion.
Its wisdom does not emanate from itself alone, is in some
paradoxical fashion both original and derivative : it has
the air of being less a product of individual force than
a result of profound partnership with some invisible
source of wisdom. The anxiety and burden of a self-
maintained position are by this fact removed ; the spirit
is freed from itself by mooring in some objective reality
constantly present to its consciousness.

And so also there is no sign of the strain which we
associate with moral or courageous effort. The motive
of religion is unlike that of an idea or principle which
evokes a dominant sense of exertion and sacrifice: it is
rather like that of a deep passion which possesses and

30 RELIGION AS SEEN IN ITS EFFECTS

supports the soul, and cancels with a margin of its own
strength any opposing motion. In brief, this person has
meat to eat which we who look on know not of; and here
lies the mystery and the fascination of religion as it
moves about in the world. It is the fascination not
only of assurance, but of the sufficiency, the simplicity,
the natural necessity, with which it utters its novelties,
moves its mountains, and ushers in its revolutions.

If its relations to its invisible Object, held inviolate
with anxious care, are such as to unbind it in some wise
from men, they are also such as to bind powerfully to it-
self whoever enters the sphere of its action. It may seem
that this Object is such only as men must serve if they
will best serve each other. It endows the judgments of
the religious soul, original as they are, not with a lower
but with a higher human currency, — as if that Object
were but reality itself. The burden of eccentricity is
thrown upon our common behavior, not on that of re-
ligion. The words and actions of the religious man be-
come authoritative for the world of men. In becoming
free, he has also become obedient to some necessity;
and in becoming obedient he has become universal.

Surely the religious spirit is living as if immortality
were its share. What its source of judgment and power
may be we have yet to discover, but in its valid origi-
nality, and in its emancipation from the stress and haste
of the temporal current, we may see a present possession
of that to which the secular spirit presses forward. That
worth-of-lif e which is commonly held as imaginary, pro-
spective, hypothetical, has become to it a matter as it were
of sensation, immediate and inescapable. That which

THE TRAITS OF RELIGION IN PERSONS 31

to men otherwise is but the word has to its knowledge
become flesh. Such present possession of the distant
sources of worth and certainty has been called "faith";
it is the characteristic of religion in all ages.

Here lies the essential distinction between religion
and the Arts on the ground of personal experience.
Art is long; religion is immediate. The attainment in
every Art is future, infinitely distant ; the attainment of
religion is present. Religion indeed involves a present
possession in some sort of the very objects which the
Arts infinitely seek. Knowledge, for example, is an in-
finite quest in the order of nature, — and in it there is
no absolute certainty but only a growing probability
and approximation : but the religious soul knows now
— and that without losing interest in the slow movement
of science. Human brotherhood also is an infinite
problem — men have to be made brothers, and the
whole of history is requisite to tell the tale of achieving
that end : but in religion men are already brothers and
experience their brotherhood in the moment of common
worship. So with morality : in time my moral task will
never be finished, for my imperfection is infinite and
my progress by small degrees ; but religion calls upon
me to be perfect at once even as God is perfect, and in
religion somehow I am perfect. By this contrast we are
helped to describe, still problematically, but with much
greater nearness than before, the nature of religion.

Religion, we may now say, is the present attainment
in a single experience of those objects which in the
course of nature are reached only at the end of infinite
progression. Religion is anticipated attainment.

32 RELIGION AS SEEN IN ITS EFFECTS

This precursory definition of religion serves the pur-
pose of such definitions — not to solve problems, but
rather to open them. In religion, we say, men live as if
in presence of attainment, of knowledge, of immortality :
but in what respect is the attainment present when in
the order of nature it must still remain at an infinite dis-
tance? What sort of present satisfaction is that which
can still leave the individual involved in the unending
struggle ? We have indeed ceased to respect as reli-
gious any state of mind which withdraws the subject from
sympathy or alliance with the age-long human labor.
Whatever may be the nature of that anticipation of all
attainment, genuine religion is not inclined — as far as
hard work goes — to take advantage of its advantage.
If being in the world it is not of the world, it is none
the less with the world and for it — in brief, in for it,
and with no loss of power. That is an extraordinary
attainment which one must still labor forever to possess :
but just this paradox is inherent in the religious con-
sciousness, and opens the way to a fundamental question
as to its nature.

For something of this same paradoxical character we
find in certain kinds of knowledge : there are insights
which come in a moment, and yet have to be kept by
endless vigilance - — as men keep their liberty. The
peculiar possession of religion is often spoken of in
terms of knowledge, as wisdom, vision, revelation,
truth. But there are reasons for doubting whether
religion is, literally speaking, a kind of knowledge.
Whatever it is, it cannot readily be translated into
valid ideas and language. Its secret is one which the
religious spirit tries not to keep but to give away — and

THE TRAITS OF RELIGION IN PERSONS 33

cannot. But what is a knowledge that cannot be
expressed, communicated, or thought? And further,
thought is but one of those same Arts which (as science
or philosophy) is a product of religion, together with
politics, poetry, and all other forms of human expres-
sion. How then can religion itself be a matter of know-
ledge?

When we speak of religion in terms of thought, is it
not according to that loose and general usage which ap-
plies the word thought to all that is inward and free in
men? ' As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he* —
that is to say, as a man orients himself, as he ' makes
up his mind/ as he feels his way in the practical anti-
theses of existence. Is it not more probable, in terms
of psychological fact, that religion consists in a practical
attitude of mind, or a mode of feeling — say in practi-
cal confidence, optimism, good-will, enthusiasm for what
is real, the power to penetrate shams that goes with
these things ? A disposition of this sort, an inward cer-
titude or faith, is indeed an anticipated attainment, * the
substance of things hoped for ' — but in more primi-
tive form than knowledge, in the form, briefly speaking,
of. feeling.

We have now to deal with this view that religion is
a matter of feeling. We may agree to use the word
feeling for the present in a very wide sense — as a
name for whatever in consciousness, deeper than ex-
plicit thought, is able to give a bent to conduct. Feel-
ing is not, as we sometimes think it, a wholly vague and
uncertain principle : it is capable of bearing much re-
sponsibility in the direction of practical living. In the
form of moral disposition, it may be the highest, as well

34 RELIGION AS SEEN IN ITS EFFECTS

as the most individual, determinant of conduct and bear-
ing. The question whether religion belongs to this
realm of practical and responsible feeling rather than
to the realm of thought is an issue of greater practi-
cal interest than may appear in this formal statement j
it will engage us for some time.

PAST H

BELIGIOUS FEELING

AND
BELIGIOUS THEOBI

CHAPTEE IV
THE EETIREMENT OF THE INTELLECT

rilHE intellect has evidently been assuming too much
JL importance, not only in religion but in life at large.
Hardly otherwise would so much satisfaction be taken
in showing this quite human organ to its subordinate
place, so much eagerness in putting our valuables into
some other custody. Wherever our likes and dislikes
are concerned, as in appreciations of beauty, moral
Tightness, and other values, logic is persona non grata
— at least in its own name. Since the impressive effort
of Kant to mark out a strictly limited province for the
valid use of the theoretical reason — a province which
all our major human interests lie safely outside of —
thinkers of the first rank (with exceptions, but with
singular accord) have added some stroke to the picture
of reason's retirement, representing it as servant of the
will, or as tool and creature of some darker and more
primal reality — blind impulse, immediate feeling, the
unconscious. In religion more than elsewhere the intel-
lectual disaffection is sweeping. One who now ventures
to discuss religion from the side of cosmology as a " the-
ory of original causation " seems to be strangely remote
from the point ; the inoffensive words, creed, dogma,
theology, are almost words of reproach. The whole ap-
paratus of reason in religion has retreated in impor-

38 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

tance, in favor of a more substantial basis — which we
have agreed to call feeling.1

This retirement of the intellect is not altogether a re-
sult of free research. So far as religion is concerned, it
strongly resembles a forced conclusion. It comes from
holding tenaciously to the immense importance of re-
ligion, while despairing of finding for it any intellectual
content having equal importance, or equal stability or
accessibility. The ideas of religion, whether in the
form of metaphysics or of revealed truth, have not been
able to command that respect and loyalty which is readily
given to religion itself. We are driven to confess that
we actually care more for religion than we do for reli-

1 The following may be taken as typical expressions of the tendency
to give feeling the primacy in religion :

Es ist seit Schleiermacher ein anerkanuter Grundsatz, dass der
innerste und eigentliche Kern der Religion im Gefuhl zu suchen sei.
E. Ton Hartmann. Religion des Geistes, p. 28.

Not only can religious knowledge never cast off its subjective char-
acter ; it is in reality nothing but that very subjectivity of piety con-
sidered in its action and in its legitimate development. A. Sabatier.
Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, p. 310.

I believe that the logical reason of man operates in this field of divin-
ity exactly as it has always operated in love, or in patriotism, or in any
other of the wider affairs of life in which our passions or our mystical in-
tuitions fix our beliefs beforehand. It finds arguments for our convictions,
for indeed it has to find them. It amplifies and defines our faith, and
dignifies it, and lends it words and plausibility. It hardly ever engenders
it ; it cannot now secure it. William James. Varieties of Religious
Experience, p. 436.

Religious experience is essentially religious feeling. H. HtSffding.
The Philosophy of Religion (tr. Meyer), p. 100.

What the future of religion is to be no one can tell. Of this, how-
ever, I think we may be sure : religious belief will stand or fall with what
I have called the Religion of Feeling. J. B. Pratt. Psychology of Re-
ligions Belief, p. 302.

THE RETIREMENT OF THE INTELLECT 39

gious theories and ideas : and in merely making that dis-
tinction between religion and its doctrine-elements, have
we not already relegated the latter to an external and
subordinate position ? Have we not asserted that " re-
ligion itself" has some other essence or constitution
than mere idea or thought ? We are in need of some
other foundation for our faith.

The proposal, then, that religion may be sufficiently
founded on feeling comes with too great promise of re-
lief to be lightly dismissed. Grant it, and all dogmatic
authority loses its pressure at once. We are set free to
be religious beings without the infinite argument and
haggling over unreachable and untestable propositions.
Creeds we wave aside ; — or else, we carry them lightly,
knowing that they are at one stroke dehorned, put out of
conflict with truth as otherwise established. We need
not any longer take their clauses to task seriatim and
verbatim ; we are free to utter the whole, if we will, as
a single expression of the feeling we call faith, as the
historic voice of a total confidence in destiny. Who can
deny that we do thereby come nearer to the intimate
sense of our creeds ? Further, if the essence of religion
is feeling, it is to be judged by feeling and not by ar-
gument, — it is to be judged as beauty and right are
judged : we are not only at liberty to bring our instincts
to bear, we are compelled to bring them to bear, — a
responsibility from which we too easily escape when re-
ligion is gained by accepting a creed. Who will say
that this requirement is not more adapted than the old
one to keep alive the spirit of genuine religion ? That
forced conclusion which has driven religion from intel-
lect toward feeling may thus prove a literal god-send to

40 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

religion. But there are other grounds for this change ;
it is, in fact, the outcome of converging tendencies so
various that they can only be called the labor of an age.
Some of these we shall pass in review.

The comparison of religions, whenever historical
movements (whether crusades, or conquests, or missions)
have made comparison inevitable, has always led to some
doubting of the face-value of creeds : for the alien re-
ligion has always made some appeal to that instinctive
knowledge of religion which we have said is a possession
of human nature. Especially is this true of that deliber-
ate scientific comparison of religions which in our own
time has yielded so great wealth of historical knowledge.
For this wealth has required of us a penetrating effort to
conceive the essence of religion in its world-wide iden-
tity : in which effort we have been steadily drawn back
of religious ideas to something more fundamental.
Men's religions, we cannot help seeing, are much more
alike than the explanations and expressions they give
for them. Diverse as are myths, prophecies, eschatolo-
gies, angelologies, and the rest, religious feeling is much
the same the world over. When identical values thus
attach themselves to quite different ideas, it cannot re-
main in doubt where the substance of the matter lies.
Theories which have varied so much might vary further
ad libitum, and religion still do its common human
work. The thing is indispensable ; the ideas that have
been connected with it are, with all their mystery and
ambiguity, perennial causes of discord, misunderstand-
ing, division without compensating benefit. It is a
pious wish to be rid of them all, if it were possible, and

THE RETIREMENT OF THE INTELLECT 4J

let mankind flow to its proper unity in the substance
of religion, in the feelings which all men share.

A similar impression is made by the life-histories of
religious movements, as we are now able to understand
them. Religion renews its life in great bursts of impulse
which emanate not from new thoughts, but from rarely
impressive personalities, capable of inspiring exalted
and passionate devotion in their friends and followers.
Their utterances are poetic, oracular, couched in figure
and parable, not in theses. While their power and
meaning seems to be propagating itself by the medium*
ship of words and thoughts, it is in reality propagating
itself immediately, by infection, by contact, by the laying
on of hands, by the leaping-across of an overmastering
fire. In the presence of such men, leaders and carriers,
others are lifted, not to high knowledge, but indeed to a
high degree of moral potency which is capable of exe-
cuting great deeds, sometimes upon the most visionary
basis. With the rise of the critical business of thinking
and philosophizing the decline of religious vitality keeps
even step. As passion cools, theology spreads; and as
theology spreads, passion cools still more. Remoteness
from religious leadership can infallibly be read in the
conditions of religious life in a given place or age.
The stream which at its source is impetuous, fierce,
channel-plowing, here at its mouth lies lazy, divided,
straggling off to the dead-level of religious homogeneity,
through the arms of shallow, reasoning sects, where (by
the very multitude of distinctions between the believers)
there is hardly any more distinction between river and
bank, saint and sinner.

The making of creeds, it is true, has never been a

42 BELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

purely theoretical interest ; creeds have had important
social functions : but these functions, we think, do not
lead us to love them more. For creed-making belongs
to the eras of political-religious propagandism stage
through which especially the religions of Buddha, Jesus,
and Mohammed have passed lingering. Creeds have
served as weapons of warfare and persecution and inner
partisan rivalries. Disfavor towards the polemic method
of religious promotion thus adds itself to the distrust
of intellect, in the rise of the religion of feeling.

But these comparative and historical judgments upon
religion are themselves results, and hard-won results, of
longer circuits of human labor ; circuits which flow wide
of any special religious interest, impinging upon reli-
gion only after coursing through the whole range of
scientific experience. It is not our religious instinct
alone, but something much like an acquired scientific
instinct which sends us looking to-day among the feel-
ing-roots of religion for its ultimate essence.1 Into the
building of that scientific instinct have entered many
strands, of which it will be sufficient for us to consider
four — the psychological, the biological, the pragmatic,
the critical.

1 Is there not much eloquence, for example, in the high value which
£§ accorded to simple and emotional religious experience in the psycho-
logical workshop ? What is it but an instinctive expression of the defer-
ence which intellect pays to religion as to a foreign power, that the investi-
gator looks so eagerly into the humblest corners to bring to light its
pearls — or seeks to lure it into his presence by means of the wily ques-
tionnaire? Surely, if the material of religious life must be thus sought,
it is something other, in essence, than the thought which seeks it. This
humble, empirical attitude of the scholar toward religion is indeed the
most convincing acknowledgment that thought finds here something other
than itself.

THE RETIREMENT OF THE INTELLECT 43

I must speak broadly in all these matters ; dealing
with general tendencies, not with the work of individual
men : dealing also for the most part with older tendencies,
such as have had time to pass into our mental habits,
not with views now rising.

First, then, of the psychological current of thought :
our world is thoroughly leavened by the conviction that
nothing is real unless it belongs to conscious experience*
Philosophers wonderfully agree in accepting the term
" experience " as a comprehensive name for whatever is
either real or significant. Pacts and events may have
their independent external existence ; but they gain liv-
ing certainty and importance only as they impinge upon
consciousness. Unless a fact is caught in the circuit
of a self ; unless somewhere it reports to the sensitive,
irritable, responsive thing we call a mind, it is nothing-
It is the inner event that is solid : the status of matter,
of energy, of all external objects, is doubtful; the ' outer
world' is best understood by relation to the inner
world, as a stimulus, or as even less than a stimulus.

The result of this conviction is that we incline to
unravel every science from its inner end, from its
psychological insertion. Where have we to look for
the sources of public events, the making of states, the
development of crafts, the making and managing of
political movements, the shaping of ideals? To human
instincts, to " human nature." There is no theory of
politics, of economics, of law, of morals, nor of religion
either, that can now dispense with its psychological
groundwork. Skill in self-knowledge, in tracing the
psychical factors of all institutions and of all history *:
this is the predominant habit and technique of our

44 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

scientific age. No such surefooted exploring of the inner
man has ever before been known.

But all this psychological habit (lineal descendent of a
subjective sort of idealism) brings with it the depreciation
of idea in favor of feeling. For ideas and thoughts are
the tools of our intercourse with external objects. They
are attempts at externality : they are at the same time
the medium of outgo from the mind to the outer world,
and the medium through which that outer world main-
tains the posture of externality to the mind. If it is only
the subject that is important, an end-in-itself, and also a
beginning in itself, then the objects of thought and theory
— together with thought and theory themselves — are
there only as means, factitious, troublesome, and circuit-
ous, through which the subject must win its satisfaction.
The real substance of that subject is something else than
intellect — a natural self with spontaneous affections
and repulsions, needs and desires, beliefs and illusions,
consistencies and contradictions. That which in human
mature is fundamental, intimate, genuine, private, and
wholly owned, is feeling: in feeling we substantially
exist.

Then there is the biological current, which easily
abets and coalesces with the psychological trend of
thought. There is something in the logic of biology
(though certainly it is no part of biology itself) which
has helped along the conviction that nothing is real un-
less it is aboriginal and germinal. Biology must find
the explanation of the characters of living things in some
interaction between these things and their environments :
but what is the " thing " which takes part in this inter-

THE RETIREMENT OF THE INTELLECT 45

action ? Naturally, it must be something which is identi-
cal throughout all the transformations of the organism,
the same in the germ and in the mature individual : but
that which is identical in the greater and in the less must
be the less, one might fairly suppose, or even less than the
less. Hence in identifying the living thing, we naturally
look toward nucleus and germ, behind the differentiated
and explicit.

Now if it is true, as it seems to be true, that conscious
life is a shape which has been taken on by some more
primitive reality; and that intellect is a more or less
advanced instrument assumed by conscious life in its later
stages : it would follow that this conscious life itself is
something else than intellect, — something presumably
of the nature of feeling.

It is true that inferences of this sort are hazardous:
the same logic would lead us to seek the explanation of
consciousness in something less than consciousness. Psy-
chology is always attracted by biology, in the search
for its own unit, into a twilight region where physi*
cal and psychical incline to blend, and can no longer
for lack of light be distinguished. Mistaking its own
ground, it is in danger of lingering and groping about
in a sort of half -world, where the mind never knows how
far to admit itself a group of tropisms, nor the brain how
far to allow its chemistry to dally with the influences of
the mind. B u t as to the position of the intellect and its
ideas there is no confusion. They are, as it were, feelers,
sparks, signals, thrown out by the deeper reality, and
subject forever to its own ultimate ends. Ideas crop out
like leaves; if they are cropped off, the root lives on —
and produces more leaves. A psychological sociology

46 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

accepts this instruction from biology, and forms its the-
ories upon these principles. What is the substance of
the family, for instance, if not in certain heavy-loaded
human instincts which survive many a dynasty of cus-
toms and custom-supporting theories. The independent
variable, in its slow march through the ages, lies far
deeper than the idea. The real is the permanent and the
ancient, as well as the germinal and creative. But only
in the form of feeling can consciousness accompany the
organism, as it is traced back to its simplest forms or to
its beginnings.

The pragmatic current, the third of these scientific
tendencies, is much older than present-day pragmatism,
which is but " a new name for some old ways of thinking."
Its conviction is that nothing is real which does not do
work. And in proportion as it appears that the work-
ing element of human nature is value-consciousness,
not fact-consciousness, pragmatic tendencies assign
feeling a higher degree of reality than idea. This is
but to make into a universal principle the repeated
observation that tf essences/ when we get close to them>
are energies — and nothing else. If we look for mental
substance, what do we find except the energy-charge of
action, which is feeling. Ideas can apparently float idle
in the mind ; facts and truths can deserve the epithet
' mere ' ; and if they do not deserve it, if they have any
grit, it is no inherent quality of their own, but added by
some gift from our own will. Especially are our ideas
about metaphysical things liable to become thus 'mere*
and dead. All available information about heaven and
hell, and more, one may receive unmoved. In a certain

THE RETIREMENT OF THE INTELLECT 47

military establishment, the pious are called " hell dodgers/'
implying that a soldier should be ready to take hell like
a man. If any stirring of concern or plan of action
comes out of the idea, that is an additional fact, not
bound to it by any definition ; and religion lies in the
stirring, not in the view. Enlightened religion has per-
ceived this from afar, and has called on men not to
acknowledge certain truths, but to love certain realities.
In this judgment biology strengthens the pragmatic
tendency, just as it abets the psychological tendency.
For an idea is (biologically) a product of friction and
hesitation in conduct : a token of failure in spontaneous
reaction. Creatures become conceptually conscious, it
appears, in proportion as they have need to extract an
identical value from an ambiguous or non-committal
environment. Hence, an idea stands for a pause
between perception and action. It is an eddy into
which the mind enters, a product of doubt and a means
of parley. But religious impulse has no need thus to
learn its line of outflow. It has no mission to special
plans of action, but rather a set and spirit to infuse into
the whole active being. Religion is one with its appli-
cation ; it exists applied. Hence, it does not pause to
hang up in the exhibit room of our ideas the program or
scheme of its meaning, as if it were something to be
deliberated — definite, defensible, and so debatable. It
is more like the breath of life, its existence its own
defense. Such immediacy and centrality belong only to
feeling.

All of these currents so far described are founded
upon a common insight, namely: that ideas have at all

48 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

points to be tested by a higher authority. This insight
is itself the burden of yet another current of thought,
much older and broader than the others, which it sustains
and makes possible : it is the critical current, coexten-
sive almost with modern times. To John Locke we owe
our prompt confidence that it is possible to set up limits
and standards for thought ; it was he who first deliber-
ately made bold to examine our ideas from the outside
— in the attitude of a physician ; it is " Dr." Locke who
first accomplishes an idea of an idea — a more or less
physical idea of an idea — and sets the fashion of as-
signing reasonable limits to the use of reason, in view
of the humble origin and restricted function of our ideas.
That we may and must look thus physicianly upon our
ideas from the outside is no longer an open question ;
it is only to be questioned what that greater thing is
which surrounds and subordinates the ideas to itself.
That higher authority, the three currents above considered
have agreed to find in the region of feeling. And so far
at least we must follow them : in every human interest
the rationale, the exposition, is weaker than the vital
meaning of the thing as retained in feeling or instinct.
And all observations of this sort are more conspicuously
true of religion than of anything else, because in reli-
gion the status of ideas is less certain than elsewhere,
and the tap root of human instinct more deeply involved.

It seems to me a weighty consensus, — this group of
tendencies which we have thus hastily reviewed. It is,
of course, no new discovery that religion is an affair of
the heart rather than of the head. Among the axioms
of that instinctive human knowledge about religion is

THE RETIREMENT OF THE INTELLECT 49

this one: that religion must be accessible to all sorts and
conditions of men, to the unlearned as well as to the
learned. If scripture and all appearances do not deceive,
babes have even a certain advantage in this matter over
the wise and prudent ; which could hardly be the case
if religion depends upon the results of thinking. Reli-
gion does not as a rule show itself strongest in the most
thoughtful; nor can the reasoner develop it in himself
by his reasoning. All these are observations of long
standing in the history of the spirit. What distinguishes
our present age is that this old truth now appears as a
philosophical conclusion, as a result hard-won and inde-
pendently won . Our sketch of some of the factors in this
conclusion, imperfect as it is, may make more definite to
us the meaning of the claim that feeling is the essence
of religion. A general conception or picture of religion
emerges, something as follows :

Religion is to be understood as a product and mani-
festo of human desire ; and that of no secondary and
acquired desire, such as curiosity, but of deep-going
desire, deep as the will-to-live itself. Its non-rational
character may be seen in the fact that in satisfying the
religious craving, an individual serves the race more than
he serves himself: as in the desires of sex and hunger,
nature uses a well-centered impulse to produce a far-
reaching effect. The religious motives of men have con-
tained the secret of political loyalty as of other costly,
death-involving loyalties. If we should venture to name
this deep-set desire which we call religious it might be
represented as an ultimate demand for conscious self-
preservation:1 it is man's leap, as individual and as spe-

1 Lippert unites many strands of theory in deriving religion from the
fundamental need of "Lebensfiirsorg*" Kulturgesohichte, chapter x.

50 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

cies, for eternal life in some form, in presence of an
awakened fear of fate. Eeligion is a reaction to " our
finite situation," a natural reflex of small and highly
aspiring beings in a huge — perhaps infinite — arena.
This reaction seems to be, at its heart, as instinctive as
a. start or a shudder. It is (in its first shock) an imme-
diate and penetrating, even appalling, recognition of
what and where I am in the universe ; it may issue in
some sense of footing, and of the direction in which
safety lies : in any case it is, in itself, a great emotional
response to the felt perils and glories of the weird situa-
tion. The unlighted vagueness of outline in this vast
setting, the necessity of moving by the most elemental
of instincts rather than by vision, the almost animal
panics and animal assurances of the adventure (as we
see them in religious history), make the language of
reason inept — even false. H we resist the impulse to
refer the whole experience to a special faculty, different
alike from thought, from feeling, and from will, in short
to a " supernatural sense," we must certainly choose the
realm of feeling as fittest to contain so unique and inti-
mate a transaction. The history of religious agony and
despair, of hope, attainment, exultation, the whole gamut
of the intense inner drama, shows beyond doubt the
locus and the eternal spring of the vitality of religion.

Such feeling is peculiarly able to retain the position
which religion must hold in our living, — the position
which reason is always exposed to losing. There is some-
thing unspoiled and original about human feeling : it
lies beyond the reach of dispute, refutation, and change.
Eeligious feeling is the adequate counterpart of those
metaphysical first principles upon which so much used

THE RETIREMENT OF THE INTELLECT 51

to be hung, in everything that made those principles
attractive. It has the same primordial and original char-
acter, the same cosmic scope and dignity; and it has in
addition what these principles had not, — the energetic
property which fits it not alone to guide but also to
instigate and to sustain what it has produced. Men have
always been more or less clear that the essence of reli-
gion cannot be far from the brewing-place of action, and
that the most sensitive test of genuine religion is in
its ethical consequences. Prophets have always been
obliged to recall idle mankind — keen to evade a hard
requirement — from the extraneous to the central ele-
ments in their religion. Of such extraneous elements,
rite and ceremony were prominent in the earlier ages of
prophetic rebuke; but in these latter days it is the
seduction of the religious idea, with the same illusory
promise of security formerly offered by the rite, that is
the chief antithesis to genuine religion. Practical and
responsible feeling bids fair to give a clear and suf-
ficient answer to the various demands which are made
upon religion. But perhaps one point should be further
dwelt upon.

For surely he is bold who asserts that religion, which
we may grant to arise out of feeling, has its satisfaction
in feeling also? In a former chapter we defined religion,
not by its origin, but by its successful completion, — as
a form of attainment: and can it be said that feeling
satisfies feeling? It has been assumed from ancient
times that these cosmic hopes and fears contain within
themselves as necessary ingredients certain theoretical
questions, which guestions can only be satisfied with

52 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

theoretical answers. It was supposed that men wanted
to know whether there he, in very fact, a god; and
whether, in historic literalness, men's souls endure after
the death of the body. These and other questions are
categorical enough, it might seem j and the plain-speak-
ing man will not be put off with other than categorical
answers.

But we are pointedly reminded by advocates of the
religion of feeling that if we have indeed such wishes as
these for express knowledge, these wishes have never
been fulfilled : and the various good reasons for suppos-
ing such questions unanswerable are so many good rea-
sons for doubting whether we have any such theoretical
needs and wishes. These alleged wishes for knowledge
have in all times been quieted by answers that can be
easily shown empty ; which would imply that the wish
itself is something other than it takes itself to be, is only
one more case of a common thing in human nature —
a misunderstanding of our own wants.

For example : we have at times set great store on the
doctrine that God exists — letting pass as relatively
unimportant the further question about the nature of
God: but clearly unless we have some tangible inkling
as to what God is like, it profits us little to know that
he is. May it not be that the real meaning of that
desire to be assured of a God is absorbed in settling our
own good-will toward our own destiny, satisfying our-
selves that in acting morally we are not playing the fool ?
Similar things have to be said of the interest in a future
life, often so zealously insisted on apart from any enquiry
into the possible nature and endurableness of a permanent
existence. Perhaps into these questions themselves we

THE RETIREMENT OF THE INTELLECT 53

have imported more of the earth, with its own person-
alities and its own time-order than we could support.

There is such a thing as greed of the spirit — so
we are told by those who find religion in feeling —
which not only claims more than it can use, but heaps
up for itself trouble by overreaching its powers. We
learn in time to be content with the " revelation " we
have; and to read that revelation more modestly than
we used, accepting the fact that in all questions of
supernatural physics and psychology the same obscurity
is the lot of man in all ages. For revelation, as we come
to see, is reticent, and slow to clarify in these matters.
If there are any coherent messages to be read, we must
gaze long into the glass to make them out. We are more
diffident about lump-communications from behind the
veil than our forefathers were. To say that our satisfac-
tion comes in the form of feeling rather than in that of
categorical propositions seems more simply conformable
to the facts. It is in harmony also with what many men
of exalted piety have reported of their own attainments :
namely, that the contents of religious insight are inde-
scribable; that as we specify them, we falsify them; that
feeling alone is right. According to these persons, as
religion becomes more true and self-knowing, it becomes
more silent ; as it becomes perfect, it becomes dumb.
It is our practical and responsible feeling which alone
can give body and substance to that which in terms of
idea is nothing.

Let us not disguise the fact that only a much altered
conception of revelation can comport with this religion
of feeling, a conception somewhat as follows : If it
may be said that God in religious attainment touches

54 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

and satisfies the spirit, his dealings are not overt and
visional, nor verbally expressible without transformation
and risk of error. In admitting the soul to new certain-
ties, revelation leads by the path of premonition, not by
that of inserted information. The transaction of God
with the soul (if there be any such transaction) is not in
the form of conversation, in which could be imparted
(though only by whisper) statements, and inside advice,
direction to the way of life, and true descriptions of
destiny to come. No : any such dealings must occur
in the unlighted chambers of consciousness, whose only
report to the vocal self is in the raw-material of feeling.
And when the attempt is made to interpret the impres-
sion thus received, it must first be projected from us,
and read as at the remote end of an unsteady beam.
We cannot but find in this projection a flickering,
uncertain record, corrupt with imagery taken from the
mind's external store, or tricked out in dress accepted
from an older custom and tradition. If such is, and has
been, the nature of revelation, we may understand the
sources of the inveterate variety and dissonance of
religious ideas. We see that it is well when men are
beaten back from the idea, as from a vain quest, to
return to the genuine import of revelation in terms of
feeling with its definite bearing upon action.

With this understanding of revelation, it may reason-
ably be held that religion, which has its origin in feeling
(of one kind), has in feeling (of another kind) its
satisfaction also.

Thus, I have stated — in a very summary fashion, but
I hope with rough justice — the more general grounds

THE RETIREMENT OF THE INTELLECT 55

for the retirement o£ the intellect in religion. I am not
wholly in accord with the conclusion to which these
tendencies have led; I have been the more desirous of
presenting them in their cumulative force.

CHAPTER V
RELIGION'S DILEMMA IN RESPECT TO THEORY

/CONSIDERATIONS of the sort we have reviewed
V^ flock to the support of him who asserts that religion
is a way of feeling. The intangible nature of religious
objects; the obscurity of revelation ; the lack of propor-
tion between religious power and religious theory ; the
direct and personal conditions of religious growth ; the
identity of religions beneath diversity of ideas; and
finally, the large consensus of scientific judgment in
subordinating thought to some more ultimate reality
as its authority. If anything could add to the weight
of all this, it might be an immediate consciousness of
what we mean by religion in ourselves ; hardly a com-
pendium of theology, but rather a governing disposition
of some sort, which may do its work as a state of feeling
whether or not we are fluent with the theory that could
justify it.

But I doubt if we find substance enough in a religion
of feeling. It has advantages of a positive sort ; it makes
religion a matter of experience, present and concrete.
But it also has advantages of a negative sort which are
highly questionable; it solves too many problems by
avoiding them ; it escapes too completely the labor and
hazard of thinking. There seems to be some natural
necessity whereby religion must try to put itself into
terms of thought and to put its thought foremost. Reli-

RELIGION'S DILEMMA IN RESPECT TO THEORY 57

gion seems to begin in feeling ; and it seems everywhere
to surrender by an inner requirement the advantage of
this simple and strong position, to risk itself in the
field of ideas with all its instability and wreckage. If
only as students of history we must come to terms with
this conspicuous fact: that religion has never as yet been
able to take itself as a matter of feeling.

Especially in its prophets and originators has the reli-
gious consciousness been stubbornly objective: it has con-
cerned itself with metaphysical objects, with God and
the other world and the laws thereof, with our remot-
est and most external objects : and it has intended to
propagate itself by fixing the eye of the mind on these
things, not on its own inner states. Doubtless the
prophet is mistaken if he thinks that he moves men only
by the truth he offers them : it may be that the actual
forces of religious propagation are much nearer his own
personality than he imagines, much nearer, certainly,
than these remote objects. Yes; but would not the
prophet lose at once in power if he should deliberately
abandon his objects and begin to exploit his own per-
sonality? Is it not true that the prophet has personal
power, in part at least, because personal power is not
his direct concern? The strength of religion in the
world (so we thought in an earlier chapter) depends upon
the fact that the religious man is free from himself.
And are we to believe that the work of religion in the
world depends on a self-deception, a permanent dis-
crepancy between what such men suppose themselves to
be doing, and what in fact they are doing?

I cannot believe that this is the case. The thread of
history is, to some extent, a thread continuous within

58 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

the intentions of the actors in history. However rich we
may become in knowledge of the deeper causes of his-
torical results, we forgo all understanding of history if
we forget this inner continuity, — i.e., the conscious
intentions of the participants in history-making and their
consciously known successes. And more than any other
element of history, religion demands to be understood
from the inside. Granted that the more exalted the
prophet, the more his work will be mixed with passion and
the more his success will be due to his intensity of feeling:
yet just because of this passion, we shall be less at
liberty rather than more at liberty to translate his fervid
assertions about God, man, and destiny into terms of
feeling. We shall be impelled, in spite of ourselves, to
attach importance to his metaphysics, if only because
he himself attaches primary importance thereto.

I will go so far as to say this : That he who sees in
the output of theory and doctrine in religion only a
natural blunder, the prophet's misunderstanding of his
own psychology, does quite as completely renounce all
insight into history as if he held to that older explana-
tion of religion by intentional priestly deception and
priestly craft. Unless the idea in religion has some
necessary and central function, we are wholly without
explanation for this lavish and persistent yield of
"revealed truth." And still more perverse and inex-
plicable must seem the universal insistence on these
intellectual by-products j the persecution and slaughter
uttered in maintaining them. Slaughter and intoler-
ance are aberrations, sometimes ; but they are aberra-
tions founded at least on convictions. They may
belong to the Dark Ages, but they do not belong to

RELIGION'S DILEMMA IN .RESPECT TO THEORY 59

the Dead Ages, of religion. Some right sense there
must be beneath all this over-violent emphasis on doc-
trine. There is no possible psychology of history
which can escape the judgment that these intellectual
ingredients of religion are in some way vital.

And when we say that it is a declining religion which
prizes the subtleties of theology, we must make a dis-
tinction between one kind of thinking and another.
There is such a thing as a congestion of cleverness
consistent with a great dearth of profound thought.
Clever and intricate theology does usually mean trivial
religion; but mighty religion and mighty strokes of
speculation have always gone together. Something like
a religious impulse is needed to sustain the flight of pow-
erful and far-reaching thought : and presumably the
converse is also true, that a religious impulse must
exhibit its force in some fundamental cognitive achieve-
ment, some Sultan's turret caught in a noose of light,
— even though this achievement may have little in com-
mon with the noisier conquests made by the logical
weapons of the forum. Deficit of mind must always, I
venture to think, be a weakness in religion, and must
rob that religion at last of all mordant power. A great
religion will produce, and demand of its adherents that
they reproduce, some great idea or system of ideas.
Such, I say, is the evident purport of history.

The intellectual elements of religion must be vital ;
yet the embarrassments which religion suffers on account
of them have hardly been overstated. Is it not probable
that in this matter of theory religion is in a genuine
predicament, unable to maintain its ideas in face of scien-

60 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

tific criticism, yet unable to dispense with them? Reli-
gion seems to labor under a double necessity : the neces-
sity of making much use of thought, and the necessity
of discounting all thought. Kant's theory regarding
our knowledge of God, immortality, and other reli-
gious objects, does fairly describe our apparent situation.
Our human mind, thought Kant, is forever obliged to
attempt the impossible in these matters : it must attempt
to express its religion in theoretical terms, and it must
deny the resulting ideas all scientific validity. Human-
ity must give conceptual form to its religious ideals and
governing principles, because these must hold their own
with all other experience and theory : but since our only
resources for framing ideas are such as pertain to this
world of natural experience, they can never truly repre-
sent to us any object which is beyond such experience.
Religious speculation is inevitable ; yet it always falsi-
fies the religious object, turns it into something human-
istic and material, something which interferes with the
clear sweep of scientific thought and at the same time
brings the religious object into the world with which
it should stand in contrast. We are thus caught in what
Kant calls the " dialectical illusion " ; and religion is un-
able to evade either of the two opposing requirements.
If there is any such dilemma as this in the nature of
the case, religious history will show it : for every such
difficulty within the mind is bound to appear in history
as a division between parties. Now just such a division
seems to break out in mediaeval Europe when scholastics
and mystics fall apart. On one side, the scholastics hold
to the theoretical validity of religious doctrines. On the
other side, the mystics are more impressed by the hope-

RELIGION'S DILEMMA IN RESPECT TO THEORY 61

less defects of the idea in religion and call for its renuncia-
tion. And each of these two parties has a characteris-
tic way of recognizing the grain of truth in the position
of the other. The scholastics are unahle to ignore the
profound difficulties in religious truth; they incline
(with their genius for slippery distinctions) to invent
a third status between truth and falsehood wherein cer-
tain parts of religious dogma must consent to dwell.
Eeligious truth has standards of its own, somewhat dif-
ferent from those of other truth : a statement which is
scientifically false (as a story of creation or of virgin
birth) may yet be religiously true and binding. The
mystics, for their part, are equally unable to ignore the
necessity for using ideas, even while the ideas are de-
fective : but as an upright and downright lot, they are
unable to reckon with shades in the status of truth.
They therefore take refuge in paradox, which is but
another way of confessing the same dilemma. Grod is
real, they assert, yet he is nothing, infinite emptiness ;
he is at once all-being and no-being. The other world
is real and objective ; yet at the same time it is within
myself — I myself amheaven and hell.1 Thepredicament
in question is thus fairly attested in religious history :
the scholastic and the mystic are facing a genuine

1 As in the lines of Silesius :

Gott ist ein lauter Nichts, ihn riihrt bein Nun noch Hier.

Je mehr du nach ihn greif st — je mehr entwind er dir.

(God is a perfect Naught ; no Now nor Here attain him.

The more them striv'st to seize, the more thon f ail'st to gain him.)

Cheruhinischer Wandersmann, I. 25.

Ich selhst bin Ewigkeit, wann ich die Zeit verlasse,
Und mich in Gott nnd Gott in mich znsammenf asse.
(I am Eternity when I have Time forsaken,
And self comprised in God, and God in self have taken.)

Same, 1. 13.

62 BELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

dilemma. And a problem set thus deep in religious
consciousness cannot be met, as in the religion of feel-
ing, by a simple retreat from the cause of the trouble,
the necessity of the idea.

We must find a solution which will give the idea in
religion positive and unambiguous standing. The sug-
gestions of the mystic and of the scholastic are all val-
uable, but so far as we have noticed them they still leave
us groping. Is there perhaps some hope in a point of
view which is both older and newer than this mediaeval
discussion and which pervades it all : namely, in holding
to the simple validity of religious knowledge while mak-
ing a distinction among our faculties of knowledge ?
The ancient distinction was made between reason and
faith. In Kantian and post-Kantian times, this same
distinction often takes the form of a contrast between
intellect and insight, thought and intuition, Verstand
and Vernunft. May it be, perhaps, that religious truth
is to be known by faith or Vernunft) a higher sort of
intelligence than common understanding ?

To my mind, all such distinctions as these leave us
precisely as we are left by the scholastics with their two-
fold truth and the mystics with their paradoxes. A dis-
tinction in the faculties of knowledge only substitutes
one problem for another. We cannot permanently re-
lieve a split in our world of idea by making a split in
the soul to account for it. All of these devices are but
various ways of stating and perpetuating the problem ;
and though this is itself no small service, it is but a
tentative one.

The best hope lies in a different direction : namely,

RELIGION'S DILEMMA IN RESPECT TO THEORY 63

in attacking the division already set up between feeling
and idea. The advocates of the religion of feeling are
not mistaken in referring our various religious ideas to
a higher authority, which they call feeling : the mistake
is, as I think, in not observing that the higher authority
is itself still idea. Idea can only be judged and cor-
rected by idea ; but these most authoritative ideas are
so much more intimately related to experience and to
feeling than other ideas as to justify nearly all that the
religion of feeling asserts. It seems probable that in
religion idea and feeling are inseparable ; and that what-
ever valid ideas religion may have are to be found in
that region of human nature where the cleavage between
idea and feeling, never more than a tendency to diverge,
no longer exists.

The religion of feeling depends on an artificial con-
ception of this cleavage. It depends in fact on three
assumptions (to summarize its various motives some-
what violently) : first, that feeling may be happily inde-
pendent of theory ; second, that theory may be drearily
independent of feeling ; and third, that valid theory in
religion is not obtainable. A study of the inner nature
of those states of mind which we call feeling and idea
should rectify these assumptions, and indicate the direc-
tion in which we may look for valid religious knowledge.
It should leave us not so much with a refutation as with
a better interpretation of those motives which have led
to the retirement of the intellect. This study we shall
now undertake, beginning with the first of the three
assumptions mentioned, and then (in chapters vii to xi)
dealing with the third and the second assumptions in
the order named.

CHAPTER VI
THE DESTINY OF FEELING

IF these ensuing enquiries into human nature are
often occupied with feeling and idea as if for their
own sakes, while the special interests of religion fall
momentarily into the background, it is because we are
obliged here to some extent to work out our own way
in independence of the usual paths of psychological
theory. I must bespeak the patience of the reader to
that end.

Of this present chapter, the thesis is a simple one,
namely this : that there is no such thing as feeling apart
from idea ; that idea is an integral part of all feeling ; and
that it is the whole meaning and destiny of feeling to
terminate in knowledge of an object. If these things are
true, they will help us to understand why a religion of
feeling always and rightly tends to transform itself into
a religion of idea.

We have already noticed how closely feeling is con-
nected with action. This is one of the great advantages
of interpreting religion in terms of feeling. Some of our
feelings are indeed less obviously active than others.
The feelings of absolute dependence, of awe, and of
reverence, which Schleiermacher regarded as the essence
of all religion, are of a relatively quiescent and contem-
plative sort. Yet these feelings also (though they are

THE DESTINY OF FEELING 65

not the whole of religious feeling) do powerfully regu-
late action, even if they do not seem at once to excite
action. In all feeling, if we look closely, we shall find
activity and the guidance of action.

But to say that feeling is the immediate cause of ac-
tivity is still to put it too far away from action. In feel-
ing, action is already begun : feeling is itself activity.
Feeling is always in transformation — as if it had need
to escape from itself. Its very existence seems to con-
sist in a kind of instability in consciousness, a nascency
and unfinishedness of mind which requires continuous
change. Emotion is a name usually reserved for certain
of our more complex feelings ; but speaking literally,
all feeling is e-motion, a flight from what is to some-
thing beyond. And thus all feelings, I venture to say,
are forms of desire — not forgetting those feelings which
seem to terminate desire, as joy, triumph, and relief —
and all have at their center a sting of restlessness.

It follows that that which can satisfy feeling is some-
thing which will destroy it as feeling. As much feeling as
is present at any time — just so much unrest and pushing
onward elsewhere for satisfaction. In the movement of
life feeling is always present, for the destruction of one
feeling is as a rule the inception of another : one feeling
debouches in another, or the appeasement of one hunger
sets in motion the springs of another. Thus emotion
maintains a perpetual circle while life lasts. But it re-
mains true that to satisfy any given feeling is to bring
that feeling to an end. And if the attainment which
religion offers is indeed a satisfaction of all desire, and
not of some fragment of our nature, it must intend a
living escape from this t perpetual circle : we should

66 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

expect to find in religion the destruction of all feeling
as such.

What is that other-than-f eeling in which feeling may
end ? I answer, consciousness of an object. Feeling
is instability of an entire conscious self : and that which
will restore the stability of this self lies not within its
own border but beyond it. Feeling is outward-pushing,
as idea is outward-reporting : and no feeling is so blind
as to have no idea of its own object. As a feeling
possesses the mind, there also possesses the mind as an
integral part of that feeling, some idea of the kind of
thing which will bring it to rest. A feeling without a
direction is as impossible as an activity without a direc-
tion : and a direction implies some objective. There are
vague states of consciousness in which we seem to be
wholly without direction ; but in such cases it is remark-
able that feeling is likewise in abeyance. For example,
I may be dazed by a blow, neither realizing what has
happened nor suffering any pain, and yet quite con-
scious that something has occurred : the experience waits
an instant in the vestibule of consciousness, not as feel-
ing but purely as fact, until idea has touched it and
defined a course of response. At that same moment
it is felt as painful. If we are right, feeling is quite as
much an objective consciousness as is idea : it refers
always to something beyond the present self and has
no existence save in directing the self toward that
object in whose presence its own career must end.

These statements are most obviously true of the feel-
ings to which we usually apply the name of desire : for
desire is clearly desire of some object or condition not
now present, and in obtaining the presence of that

THE DESTINY OF FEELING 67

object desire ceases. But how can these statements be
applied, as we said, to the feelings of satisfaction
themselves? Are joy and triumph also unsatisfied
states ? Is pleasure, dwelling hard on its present object,
such a seeking-process as we have here pictured ?

As to pleasure, it wants more of the same — more
than it now has : that is what defines it as a state of
feeling. It is an old and well-worn analysis of pleasure
which identifies it with a tendency to approach more
nearly the object which gives the pleasure. When pleas-
ure ceases to require further approach, it becomes sim-
ply a vehement cognizance of its object : its character
as feeling is dissolved into a state of knowledge* As to
the feeling of triumph — triumph, " unable to contain
itself/' has certainly much to do. It may wear itself out
in shout and song. More probably it becomes aware of
a destination which is common to most of our positive
feelings — namely, a social aim of some sort. The rest-
lessness of triumph will usher the subject along toward
his friends or his populace, until in physical contact with
their responses (a flood height within balanced by an
answering flood height without), the internal tumult is
appeased and feeling disappears — into what? Into
clear, animated cognizance: cognizance genially dis-
tributed over the new situation created by the event of
triumph, and the common knowledge of it. All the
"feelings of satisfaction" so far as there is feeling left
in them, in the same way move on to cognizance.
Heightened feeling hastens to fund itself in heightened
consciousness, that is, in a keener sensitiveness, a more
unshrinking objectivity.

All positive feeling, I dare now say, reaches its ter*

68 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

minus in knowledge. All feeling means to instate some
experience which is essentially cognitive : it is idea-apart-
from-its-object tending to become idea-in-presence-of
its-object, which is " cognizance/' or experiential know-

And thus knowledge, which of old has had the dreary
character of feeling-quencher, must also be accepted as
feeling-goal, the natural absorbent and destiny of feel-
ing. All positive feeling is at heart some marriage quest
which ends in knowing. And such knowledge, so far
from being less a * value-consciousness ' than the feeling
which has led up to it, is but the more excellent condi-
tion of that very value-consciousness embodied in the
feeling. Such feeling so far from being less a " fact-
consciousness " is, in its guiding idea, throughout a
prophecy of the fact ; as if the object itself were press-
ing to be known in presence. In the satisfaction of
feeling, the guiding idea coalesces immediately with the
object then known as present : to the including mind
there is perfect continuity between prophecy and fulfil-
ment— the feeling is unaware of death. In truth, it is
not dead, but risen (aufgehoben) : cognizance and feel-
ing are but different stages of the same thing.

These observations (superficial as they still are — and
over-general) 1 must modify somewhat our impressions

1 I have made no distinctions between the several meanings of the
,/ord * feeling/ though few terms in the language are so highly ambiguous.
Nor do I think that I have fallen into obscurity on that account. The
mind (we as psychologists should admit) is as intricate as we choose to
take it — and as simple. The truth about our inner states does not wait
until we have found the "psychical atom." Some truth about feeling
may be conveyed, even without definition.

THE DESTINY OF FEELING 69

of the pragmatic contrast between feeling and idea. It
is true that ideas apart from feelings do no work : but
it is also true that a feeling does no work apart from
its guiding idea. Though feeling is close to action, is
incipient action, it is not without incipient idea: and as
this idea becomes adequate, the working effectiveness
of the feeling is not diminished, but enhanced. If the
idea is vague the feeling may waste itself in spluttering
activity with little satisfaction ; there is economy of con-
duct in proportion as feeling (so to speak) learns its own
mind. Thus, whether feai leads to wild flight or to sim-
ply climbing a tree may depend on the "presence of
mind " in the feeling. We cannot properly draw a con-
trast in regard to working-power between idea in general
and feeling iu general; because the working-forces of
consciousness are neither ideas nor feelings, but always
idea-feeling couples.

Instead of contrast, there is a very obvious equivalence

It may be asked whether any such account as this does not omit what-
ever makes feeling distinctive. What becomes of the color and quality of
our psychical states — the nuances of joy, grief, gaiety, ease, kindly ex-
pansiveness, and infinite others, which temper the mind's atmosphere from
moment to moment ? Whatever ideas and transitions toward knowledge
may be involved in these, is it not the quality and flavor which we lose,
just as the qualities of nature are lost in the language of matter and mo-
tion? It is true that such quality, in itself, is precisely what no description
or explanation can capture — or need to. For these colors of the mind are
to be predicated always of the whole mental state, never of any elements of
it. Feeling-tones of this sort do not float about in the mind-current like
fish in a stream, nor take part as strands in a total movement : they are
best placed, I believe, as the interest which the mind at any time is taking
in its own existence. They are the total impression which living, from mo-
ment to moment, is making upon the ultimate liver. Our own discussion
IB concerned with what goes on within the actual mental movement : feel-
ings as we are concerned with them are distinguishable working-elements
in that movement.

70 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

between feeling and idea in this respect, such that idea
may gradually substitute itself for feeling while doing
the same work. The guiding idea of any repeated feel-
ing becomes by degrees more adequate : as this occurs,
the feeling itself seems to diminish, as if it had been, in
part, absorbed or transformed into the idea. Thus, the
emotional side of love inclines to transform itself into
an "understanding," in which the meaning of the feel-
ing is carried out in the system of ideas and actions
which constitute permanent friendship. This system of
active understanding is precisely what the original emo-
tion meant and prophesied ; the feeling which seems lost
has its living equivalent in what we may call the creed
of that relationship. And it will reassert itself as feeling
if those habits of friendly action are interrupted.

Or again, a feeling of distrust toward some person,
at first without tangible grounds, succeeds — we will
suppose — in defining its basis. Thereafter, conduct
toward the distrusted person need be no wholesale re-
jection or avoidance : I may make definite negations on
definite grounds ; and on the other hand, I may accept
with confidence other relations in which the defined trait
plays no part. Such definition is a relief ; a degree of
mental friction disappears ; feeling is less intense : the
new working-couple (lowered feeling, heightened idea)
does the same kind of work as the older working-couple,
but with more efficiency. Knowledge of human nature
tends to place men instead of hating them or blaming
them : and the traditional impassivity of this kind of
wisdom is no absence of feeling, but only a relatively
complete translation of emotion into a working creed.

In practice, we reckon a feeling of aversion toward

THE DESTINY OF FEELING 71

any project as equivalent to some reason against it: and
a feeling of attraction counts as some reason in its favor.
In any public arena, feelings and thoughts thus mingle
upon the same footing ; they are added and subtracted
as coin of the same mint in all the actual transactions
of persuasion. But in any such arena, to become explicit
is a gain. One often yields his feeling to the pressure
of tangible considerations with the impression that the
feeling must have been victor if it could have met the
tangible on its own ground. The prejudice which can
get itself formulated in language has an immense ad-
vantage in the struggle for existence. Or, it is known
for what it is, and done away with. However great one's
faith in the un-idead regions of existence, that faith is
newly-born when through some stroke of conception,
outlines of a felt foundation loom for the first time out
of obscurity into relief. The feeling has been an antici-
patory thought, a fact throughout of the same nature.

A large part of what we call thinking is nothing
other than the effort to gain this kind of possession of
ourmore helpless meanings. Poetry (playground of ideas)
is the form in which the feeling or spirit of an age wins
its first breath ; and philosophy (idea hard-labor-ground)
attempts the complete transformation of the feeling into
literality, which means connection with earth. In all
this, we have continuity and equivalence between idea
and feeling, quite as significant as in any physical
€ equivalence and transformation of forces.* To make an
aspiration or a motive visible in idea is not to render it
more abstract, is not to alter its identity or its character
or its pragmatic bearing ; it is simply to give it status
among other expressed tendencies. This pragmatic equiv-

72 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

alence is a confirmation of the substantial sameness of
idea and feeling; of the destiny of feeling to fund
itself in idea.

These general characteristics of feeling hold good of
religious feeling. Feeling is known as religious, rather
than as some other sort, by the peculiarity of its objects
and ideas. Fear is a fundamental element in religious
feeling ; but what distinguishes a given type of fear as
religious ? Why is it that such fear appears only in the
human being, not in the animal ? Because it is roused
by a situation which it requires human imagination to
grasp. Some conception of the Whole of things, some
super-stition is necessary before that fear can take hold
of the mind, even though it be excited by purely natu-
ral happenings. The same of religious hope and wor-
ship. The same of religious attainment, and the feeling
of assurance which comes of it. In a human being, to
" feel sure " and to know one's ground are one and
the same thing — perhaps in different stages of distinct-
ness. If religious enthusiasm comes to rest in a state of
6 peace/ this state is a state of feeling only in that
same metamorphosis by which all feeling in its satisfac-
tion vanishes in cognizance, the sting of restlessness
having been drawn. The Stoic's summit was apathy —
non-feeling : religion also wins a non-feeling — but a
positive sort — let us say, metapathy, a state beyond
feeling, not beneath it. What feeling was has not
ceased to be; but it exists as a heightened value
diffused over all experience. The measure of life is
increased; and that measure is perhaps well enough
described at present as a measure of cognitive pene-

THE DESTINY 0? FEELING 73

tration. Religious success becomes, I think, precisely
this : an unshrinking objectivity.

The strains of religious feeling belong especially to
that period of life in which one is working out his
Weltanschauung. Conversion is in part at least the
grasping of an idea ; such an idea as can thereafter in-
fuse itself with peaceful dominance through the system
of conduct and belief. Starbuck calls attention to the
value of intellectual points of fixation in tiding over the
storms and stresses of adolescence : without some ideas
through which feeling can win an interpretation, " one
is torn by he knows not what." And the storm and
stress itself may be regarded as a process of deep think-
ing, carried on by the whole organism.

Religious feeling, then, like other feeling, is all idea-
material, idea-activity. Dissolve out the idea-tissue of
religion, and no feeling, and so no religion, is left.
Holding our pragmatic test to religion, requiring of it
that it do its work, we will have no religion without a
theory ; we will have no religion without a creed.

Religion as feeling must aspire to complete self-under-
standing and ultimately to a complete transformation
of all its emotion into a present knowledge of its de-
sired object, whatever that may be. This truth pre-
vents us from resting satisfied with feeling: but it is fair
to observe that it does not provide us, as yet, with any
substitute. We have not yet enquired what the essen-
tial meaning of religious feeling is ; nor have we at all
shown that such sure self-understanding and ultimate
satisfaction can be obtained. It remains possible, so far
as we have yet shown, that our religious impulses must

74 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

continue, so long as we are human, to grope for their
own meaning: and it may still be held that the ideas
which religious feeling makes use of must always be
partly mistaken, tentative, and mythical.

The supposition that religion must put up with im-
perfect equipment of theory does no violence to human
nature as we otherwise know it. It is a notorious fact
that feelings may frequently find their satisfactions
through misfit ideas. My ill-temper, in search for its
own theory, is more than likely to adopt a false one and
expend itself on some innocent head. If a nation is
lusting for war, no one can foresee on what pretext the-
ories of offended national honor or of manifest destiny
may make fatal alliance with the belligerent impulse.
Such mistaken self-interpretation is not always the fault
of feeling, but often its fate : for it can only press into
service such ideas as are at hand. The deeper and
obscurer cravings and discomforts of body and soul
must frequently be diagnosed by the sufferer almost in
the dark, with a slender gamut of hypotheses ; it is not
surprising if many a self-made invalid results from a
faulty theory of one's own feeling, fit to be cured by a
course of bread-pills or other placebos. And who will
say that the various religious doctrines of mankind, min-
istering as they do to the obscure spiritual cravings of
the race, have not acted rather as placebos than as lit-
eral interpretations and satisfactions of these feelings?
Harmless remedies for the most part, because very likely
there is no such explicit truth here to be had — none,
therefore, to be conflicted with : they serve their func-
tion in setting the mind at peace, and harmonizing the
active impulses of the empirical self.

THE DESTINY OP FEELING 75

Let us be at one with our saints, as in reality we are
one with them, in the drama of their moral will. And
let us be free of the allegory in which they depict to
themselves that drama, free to take other allegories as
well, or to put forth our own. I read Augustine with
wonder : but with the greater nearness when I see (as
who can fail to see) that his spiritual crises hang upon,
and swing about, intellectual snags irrelevant to the
real issue — whether G-od is extended in space, whether
evil is a substance, whether Paul contradicts Moses and
himself : why dost thou halt upon these matters, friend
Augustine, if not to delay the course of that dreaded
moral requirement so great in thee ? The settlement
of thy problem, which looks so much like a theoretical
result, — is it not in truth an inevitable moral deci-
sion, governed from afar by thy deep religious feeling,
playing itself out in terms of speculative issues which
only symbolize the inner meaning of the process ?

This well-known point of view is quite compatible
with what we have said about the destiny of feeling:
and it can only be dealt with by a direct enquiry into
religious knowledge. But one or two remarks may be
made before beginning that enquiry.

It is obvious, I think, that no one would adopt such
a position as this if he believed that a more satisfactory
status of idea were possible. And further, no one can in
reality make use of religious ideas which he believes to
be thus mythical. It is quite possible to adopt a mistaken
theory, believing it to be true ; but it is not possible to
adopt a mistaken theory believing it to be mistaken, or
even allegorical. Our real theory is the meaning of that
allegory as we understand it, and not the allegory itself.

76 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

Feeling is a thing which cannot, in its own nature, re-
main in the dark. Whatever our Most Enlightened
View about the nature of religious truth may be, that
Most Enlightened View becomes, willy nilly, the rule for
our feeling. The more vehement the feeling, the more
it resents darkness (and certainly all deliberate parasol-
protection) and pushes for clarity. In their demand for
idea, our major feelings rather possess us than we them.
More especially the race-old feelings we call religious will
hold to their service all of our new and best insights, all
our detections-of-general-religious-mistake, all our suspi-
cions of subjective-intention-in-objective-myth: they will
identify themselves with these insights, partial and unsat-
isfactory as they are, until we provide an idea-system
which is fit, necessary, and adequate to our present
stage of self-conscious attainment.

NOTE. In the four following chapters (chapters vii-x),
dealing chiefly with the competence of the idea, it will be
necessary to consider certain adverse positions, as of Bergson
and Hoffding. These chapters though as little technical as
possible may have for the general reader a difficulty which I
cannot wholly avoid. If any such reader finds that these prob-
lems are not his own problems, I may advise him to omit these
chapters, passing at once to chapter xi, which resumes the
argument as we now leave it, stating a proposition regarding
the organic relation of idea and feeling which is fundamental
to our whole view of religion. Then in chapter xii, the theory
that religious truth depends on the will is discussed in detail,
both in the form in which James states it — the well-known
will-to-believe — and in the form in which Eoyce holds it —
namely, that reality is the fulfilment of an absolute purpose.
This chapter, again somewhat refractory, concludes the labo-
rious controversial part of our work.

CHAPTER

HOW IDEAS OF IDEAS MISREPRESENT THEM

WE have said that feeling has need of idea; that it
can get no pragmatic hold on us without idea ; that
it has no existence except as it were a suicidal one — to
disappear in knowledge. We might further have said
that except through idea feeling cannot consciously com-
municate itself. Our feelings we do, for the most part,
instinctively seek to share : few feelings are not improved
hy social reflection. But if we have a pleasure or a grief
to express to another, we do so (if we can) by telling
the tale, or by pointing out the object, on which the
feeling depends; not by simply showing the feeling, or
explaining it. If we must give the clue to the fun, or to
the sorrow, or to the admiration, by our own prior grimace
or gesture (not to say word), we know there is loss in
passage : if we are so far overcome that we have nothing
but emotion to give, we are pitiable — or ridiculous.

It is seldom, indeed, with our limited control of idea,
that an emotion passes from mind to mind by idea alone,
or can so pass : but the communicator is bound in good
faith to bring forward what idea he can, with all prompt-
ness, and to rest his case on that. There is an ethics in
the communication of whatever feeling, binding the com-
municator to the limit of his powers to be objective, to
make no conscious exploit of his own affectedness. This
rule of first intentions must hold, I fancy, with extreme

78 RELIGIOUS FEELIKG AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

rigor in the case of religious feeling. It would be no
crime in an actor if he should try to make me weep by
himself weeping (though he would do better to show a
great effort at repressing his tears) : but what outrage
when the like occurs in religion! The spirit of the
prophet who has communicated his religion, and his
feeling therewith, by the circuitous way of idea and
doctrine is right — is alone right. Passion in history
retains its soundness and force just so long as it forgets
itself and holds to its objects. All else puffs out, or
putrefies. The taint of emotional exploitation on the
part of the more sophisticated trustees of religion must
long since have killed the church had it not been for the
sound objectivity of the people. Their exploitableness
is their moral superiority.

Attempts on the part of * the enlightened ' to take with
the same objective good-faith the words of the prophets
must meet with many defeats; to find the tenable ideas
of religion is indeed no easy matter: but it is the temper
of defeat to cry too early, All is lost ! The mutual
cancellations of our divergent religious thoughts and
theories leave no idea in the whole field unquestioned :
but it has yet to be shown that all idea is thereby
eliminated and impossible. Idea has many lives, is
of tougher substance than we think ; and has perhaps
greater resources for grasping the remote and super-
sensible parts of reality.

We need to enquire into the capacity of our instru-
ments of knowledge. Most of our prevalent doubts
regarding our ability to reach knowledge in religion are
based on false conceptions of what an idea is. These
false conceptions are natural enough; it is hard to make

HOW IDEAS OF IDEAS MISREPRESENT THEM 79

an idea of an idea that will not misrepresent it. For it
is natural to think of ideas as we think of things — men,
bricks, magnitudes, events. We cannot think of any
idea that is not an idea of something: and in thinking
of the idea, that something shines through the transpar-
ent substance of the idea itself, and our thought of the
idea becomes mixed with our thought of the idea's
object. We need constantly to remind ourselves that
our ideas are what we think with, not what we think of,
in the order of nature. When we try to think of an
idea, we are proceeding in some way against nature,
taking nature backward : it is not surprising if in our
attempts to do this the resulting conception of the idea
is denatured to some extent, and so misjudged.

The first objects which are taken up in great numbers
into our knowledge are objects of the physical world,
fixed in outline, mechanical for the most part, and finite :
it seems to us, then, that our ideas of these objects par-
ticipate in these qualities, and the consequences of this
impression are far-reaching. For if ideas have about
them some inherent rigidity and finitude, if intellect is
indeed a mechanical affair, they can do no justice to
reality in its infinitude and its incessant flux and
change. The kind of knowledge of ultimate things
which religion has supposed itself to need — nay, the
very conceptions of those objects, the familiar terms
of religious doctrines — are scientifically impossible. I
wish, then, to examine our ideas of ideas; and to con-
sider in the first place the supposed rigidity of ideas.

An idea, it seems, is a piece of one's mind : a piece so
delimited, outlined (d£coup£e), that it can be individu-

80 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

ally used, handled, referred to. One cannot handle the
ocean : but water-buckets-full, casks-full, tanks-full, taken
out of the ocean can be handled well enough. Such
water-bucket, or other vessel, has known contents : it is
a bit of the ocean, bound, measured, put under control,
lifted into relief from out of the general wash of waters,
and set to work. Such is " an idea" in the general flux
of consciousness : a vessel of known contents, manipu-
lable, destined to some work. And to what work ? In
part, at least, to such work as is performed by coins,
vessels of value : namely, to possess me of my valuables
in convenient, storable form ; to measure and assess the
worth of new facts, recognizing them in their bearing
upon my actions; also to serve as unit of exchange,
whereby such pieces of my mind may be passed on to
others. What better simplest image or symbol of idea
could be devised than the circle — an enclosed bit of
space of known contents — precisely such symbol as is
in common use among logicians ?

This, I think, fairly describes our usual conception of
an idea. And such images as these of the water-bucket,
the coin, the circle, contain all that is true in our usual
conception, together with all that is false. They contain
enough truth to be exceedingly useful, enough also to be
exceedingly seductive. So far does the correspondence
between ideas and the logician's circle-diagrams hold
good, that logic itself may appear to be nothing more
than a sort of space-play or topology, our thinking pro-
cesses a sort of " geometrizing." l Our conception of the

1 Bergson's epithet. It is indeed sufficiently remarkable that our
thought-relations can be represented at all in terms of space-relations — not
to say BO completely represented. It has often excited speculation that

HOW IDEAS OF IDEAS MISKEPRESENT THEM 81

idea begins to partake of the rigidity, the lifelessness,
the finitude of these inevitable images. And we can
hardly better win a true idea of idea than by enquiring
how far these spatial symbols, circles and the rest, are
appropriate and valid; and where they begin to work
false.

In the first place, our spatial symbols represent truly
the definite inclusions and exclusions of our ideas. One
is said to have an idea of an object when he can recog-
nize it, and tell it from every other thing in the world.
Ideas do not always accomplish this infallible identifica-
tion of their object. Most ideas of actual things have
doubtful boundaries — as of animal from plant, or of
river from brook — their lines are less sharp than the
circle ; but the ideal idea knows its own, and excludes
even more sharply than any actual circle-outline ; more
sharply, in fact, than any except the boundary of the
idea-circle. The power of perfect definition is con-
ferred on the circle 6y the idea, not on the idea by the
circle. In this matter of definite inclusion and exclu-
sion, then, the circle does not misrepresent the idea.

In the second place, each idea has its own changeless

some deep-going vital unity must obtain between tbe structure of space and
the structure of intellect. It has been a great point with idealism ; support-
ing the notion that space is but the mind itself, externalized, and readable
by tbe mind as a foreign object. F. A. Lange, in particular, was much im-
pressed by this correspondence- And most recently M. Bergson has thrown
a biological light on the matter by reminding us that intellect and phys-
ical world have grown up together in the course of evolution ; that they
have been modeled for each other, to some extent also, ly each other; that
the intellect inevitably "geometrizes" because it is its primary nature,
not to know self or reality, but to guide our physical conduct to its phys-
ically practical ends. The correspondence, then, has attained a certain
philosophical celebrity.

82 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

identity, a character fitly represented by the circle, or by
any other fixable object. To suppose an idea to change
is to suppose it to become another idea. We could never
recognize an object as being the same object unless we
infallibly meant the same : nay, we could never know
a thing as not the same unless we were sure of a same-
ness of meaning. Permanence of meaning, taken in
total, is but our own mental integrity, our personal iden-
tity itself. The permanence and sameness, then, of any
poor chalk-circle, or world-orbit for that matter, is
infinitely unfit to symbolize the unwavering sameness of
idea, save for a short span, and by leave of the idea
itself. It is the idea again that confers identity on the
circle, not the circle that confers identity upon the idea.
In this matter of changelessness, then, the circle cannot
misrepresent the idea, for it has no other changelessness
than that of the idea itself.

If, then, we admit these characters of the idea found
in the symbol — its changeless identity, and its aim to
be perfectly defined and exclusive — do we not also ad-
mit that the idea is rigid, even as the symbol is ; and
therefore equally unable to deal with this living world
as it is ?

M. Bergson is at this hour most impressively insisting
upon the fatal discrepancy between a reality which is
fluent, passing, ever-growing, and an idea-world which
is static, rigid, conservative, mechanizing what it touches.
There is something about change, especially about life-
change, which never gets caught in our ideas : this fact
the history of thought has repeatedly been compelled
to notice. The idea seems not only to fail, but somehow

HOW IDEAS OF IDEAS MISREPRESENT THEM 83

to falsify, when it intends to grasp a living thing : as
if in fixing it, it had also transfixed it, and could carry
about but a dead image.

Now, I must confess that in all such criticisms of the
idea I seem to see pointed out rather defects in our hu-
man industry and loyalty than any inherent defect of
the idea itself: for if an unchanging idea is sufficiently
true to its object, it must entertain every change and
development in that object. It must change just "because
it is constant; it must change in content because it is
changeless in meaning. I can see that there is much
human idleness to be overcome in keeping our ideas fresh
while their objects are developing ; I can also see that
a satisfactory life-theory, mind-theory, world-theory, will
require of us infinite racial labor. But I know not how
to describe this labor except as the labor of idea-making.
The " inherent discrepancy " eludes me ; seems, to speak
plainly, a demonstrable confusion. For that with which
the " rigid idea" is contrasted is the "fluent reality"
held up to contemplation — of which "fluent reality"
then we have some idea : and can it be that this idea of
the " fluent reality" is itself also rigid? Is this fixed-
ness, or unbending idea-quality, idea-starch, such that no
valid meaning is contained or containable in those con-
ceptions we name ' change/ ' growth/ or even ' wilting/
' deliquescing/ * melting/ ' dissolving/ and the like ? On
the contrary, no ideas are more useful and more used
than these ideas of change by M. Bergson and the other
authors in question. To know these things, it is said,
we must revert to immediate experience. But whatever
can interest in experience is already caught in idea : there
is nothing in experience which cannot become content

84: RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

of idea, for what else is the (empirical) idea but selected
experience, in shape for memory and communication?
Idea is a universal tool, making no demands upon its
subject-matter. It takes the contour with perfect faith-
fulness, perfect transparency, perfect non-interference,
of whatever can hold (through whatever movement or
metamorphosis) the same interest. Give me an interest
in a cloud, or in a revolution : at no point do I find my
pursuit of that shifting object barred by some stiff-joint
of my idea. Give me an interest in the thing you call
reality, and if it is to be met with in experience at all,
nothing can prevent idea from holding it, in all its flux
or creativity. Whatever character you give this reality,
in mentioning that character you have already confessed
an idea of it. Indeed, it is futile to define any region of
the world as the exclusive or favorite region of idea :
for the only force which can confine idea to such
domain is the force of idea itself.

I do not suppose that these considerations are unfelt
by such a thinker as M. Bergson. Not only is he aware
of them ; he anticipates them. It is not impossible to
think change, he says, but only almost impossible. It
is counter to our mental habit (habitude statique de
notre intelligence); it is like climbing backward the slope
of our confirmed intellectual direction (remonter la pente,
etc.). While ideas of qualities (adjectives) and ideas of
forms (nouns) clearly choose to mean only states, still-
states, of our world, ideas of action and change (verbs)
have a tinge of the non-static in them ; yet they too are
interested not in the process per se, but in the terminals
thereof; they present chiefly a picture of the ends of
the movement, and a still-chart of its course. " L'ide6

HOW IDEAS OF IDEAS MISREPRESENT THEM 85

du changement est la, je le veux bien, mais elle se cache
dans la penombre. En pleine lumiere il y a le dessin
immobile de Pacte suppose accompli . . . Adjectifs et
substantifs symbolisent done des etats. Mais le verbe
lui-meme, si Ton s'en tient a la partie eclairee de la re-
presentation qu'il evoque, n'exprime guere autre chose." 1
Significant "guere." Significant " penombre." Bring-
ing into some question that striking definition of the
idea (though only of the Greek eTSos) as a flash-view,
or instant (la vue stable prise sur 1'instabilite des choses).
Bringing into some question also that famous figure of
the intellect as a moving-picture apparatus, dealing es-
sentially only in such instantaneous views, mechanically
fused together (mecanisme cinematographique de la pen-
s£e). For what is it that rejoins these separate flashes
of the actual moving-pictures into a continuum of move-
ment? Not, for us, the mechanical apparatus; for that
emits nothing but discontinuous flashes (with due inter-
val, to be sure, and regularity.) What rejoins them
if not our own way of interpreting, perhaps of sensing,
the succession ? But hardly of sensing, nor yet of per-
ceiving, if M. Bergson is right : for perception, accord-
ing to him, rather turns motions into states, than states
into motions (notre perception ne doit guere retenir du
monde materiel, & tout instant, qu'un 6tat ou provisoire-
ment elle sepose.)2 One knows not where to look, if this
is so, except to our own ideas. At all events, the con-
tinuous-change character is something not here found in
the data of immediate experience, is something added
by us to those data out of our own meanings. Some
idealistic path seems to open out here — " idea-creator-

i Evolution crdatrice, p. 328, 3me ed. 2 Ibid, p 326.

86 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

of-its-own-world," or the like : into this path we shall
not enter. But must we not perforce admit change
and rest, static and non-static, to full coordinacy, so far
as our idea-power is concerned?

Idea does no doubt enable us to store change in mem-
ory, as hardly it is storable in fact. Thus stored, we
are able to dwell upon it, retrace it, in such retracing
to alter its rate as we will, — pass from beginning to end
with indefinite speed (change intense), or from end to
beginning, or pause to take the time of its passage
through this point and through that — but in all these
liberties taken, we are under no deceit. Unless time
could be remembered as it is, there could be no mind;
if keeping the past in present view denatured time, and
turned it into a sort of space — time itself would drop
out of meaning, and out of reality, for us. A present
idea, and an idea of a present, are not necessarily the
same; a changeless idea and an idea of only-the-change-
less are not equivalent phrases. Has not M. Bergson
fallen into the error from which he himself would warn
us, that of applying to the idea the characters of its
(physical) objects?

And if we wish to know the real source of such diffi-
culties as the mind falls into in gaining an explication
of reality, shall we not find it rather in the exigencies
of finishing our idea-systems than in the incompetence
of the individual idea ? The paradoxes of Zeno are due,
not to the difficulty of grasping motion in idea, but to
the difficulty of putting the idea of motion into terms of
the idea of rest. The incommensurables are both in the

HOW IDEAS OF IDEAS MISREPRESENT THEM 87

region of ideas; the dilemmas arise from the necessity
of clarifying our ideas by relating them to other ideas;
•eventually, of explaining a thing in terms of what it is
not. Thus may it not be with reality also? If it
appears in experience, then also in idea: but whether
the idea can make connections with other ideas is not
thereby decided. These other ideas try to gain rela-
tions to the idea of reality, that is, to set up predicates
for our idea : but the predicates may not fit.

It is chiefly our idea-connections and systems that
threaten to stiffen and falsify the living thing. To be
forewarned that any such idea-connection is liable to
need revision is to escape the consequences of rational-
istic rigidity, without abandoning the needful work of
system-making. We cannot cease to observe that S is
P ; but we can enter the caveat — " with reservations and
conditions, not yet wholly known." System-making
cannot cease, because in part it is the life of the mind
itself — expressible as an automatic process in part.
Every idea, we might say (again with justified psychical
mechanics), attracts every other idea — tempts it into
-some union or other, for which it may or may not be fit.
The number of mechanical ideas we possess is hereby a
perpetual menace to the integrity and virtue of the non-
mechanical. Ideas of life and of living things are thus
constantly exposed to m&salliance, need continually to
be guarded from mechanization. This, as it seems to
me, is the real meaning of the complaint that our ideas
are rigid and cannot do justice to reality. We have
a greater population of mechanical ideas than of others
— they are " the masses " in our mental State — whence
a certain instability of the others in their rightful

88 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

place. The remedy is first, in simply knowing the dan-
ger; second, in holding the non-mechanical ideas to
their own character ; third, in producing more of the
non-mechanical sort. This is in every way the result of
such work as Bergson's, except for his too physical idea
of idea.

The general name for this process of making connec-
tions among ideas is reasoning. We would therefore
agree with Bergson and others that it is not by reason-
ing, in this sense, that reality is first known. Reason-
ing, or thinking, is a process which insists first on con-
nectedness of ideas ; is willing to reach new territory
only from old, and by approved truss-work, in cantilever
fashion : " intuition," or immediate knowledge, is capa-
ble (relatively speaking) o£ ignoring connections, of
seizing a bridge span in mid air and holding to it while
truss and abutments grow. But in the one case as in
the other it is idea-work that we witness, — nothing
different. So of "instinct " which is often appealed to
as a more adequate organ than idea for knowing reality.
What is there about reality which instinct can divine
while idea must remain confined to its clear-cut and
barren circles ? If any real What, significant of any-
thing, then ipso facto idea, though the work of wooing
that idea into our systems and reasonings may well be
the work of ages and of races of men.

It is only in very recent years that religion has di-
rectly suffered from this particular aspect of the distrust
of ideas : for religion has, in the main, been content to
conceive its God, its world, its various objects of dogma,
as unchanging — in view of which, idea may be as rigid
as we please, without detriment. It is only as the ne-

HOW IDEAS OF IDEAS MISREPRESENT THEM 89

cessity has arisen in the speculative mind to recognize
flux and growth in everything, even in God himself, that
loyalty of idea to its meaning becomes felt, in religious
discussion also, as the idea's rigidity and incompetence.
Modernism feels it ; such writers as William James, and
in popular vein as Mr. H. G. Wells, complain of it in
religious context. But a deeper and older ground of
distrust — perhaps at the bottom of this very prejudice
regarding rigidity — is the sense that the idea is finite,
fitted to cope only with the simpler, poorer, exhaustible
phases of reality. To this more fundamental difficulty
we must now turn.

CHAPTEE
THE ALLEGED FINITUDE OF IDEAS

ALL pictures of the idea which we are likely to frame
to ourselves — circles, coins, counters, ocean water*
buckets — would agree in at least this one point : the
finitude of the idea. The essence of the idea is known
contents, marked off from the infinite unknown. An
idea is a mental achievement, a success of some sort, un
fait accompli, a usable possession : whence that which
is unconquerable and unpossessible, the infinite, must
be left outside the idea. Efforts, indeed, the mind is
continually making to encompass gulfs, seas, the ocean
itself; or let us say, to decoy limitless genii into stop-
pered bottles : and in these enterprises certain partial
successes seem always on the eve of happening — some
robe corner or perchance a toe of the genius approach-
ing the bottle, actually in the bottle ; just enough en-
couragement to prevent sanguine mortals from forgoing
the quest of the infinite altogether, and yet no authen-
tic triumph. These are, to speak most hopefully, pro-
spective ideas ; and do but serve to show what finitude is
implied in the achieved idea. It is clear enough what
bearing this finitude of idea may have upon religious
thought, which must needs try to think the Infinite :
this bearing has been sufficiently exhibited by all those
philosophers whose point of pride is their humility and
candor, since Herbert Spencer, and also before him.

THE ALLEGED FINITUDE OF IDEAS 91

How the religion of feeling is concerned in this issue
none has shown so well as Professor Hoffding.1 Reli-
gion cannot reach its goal in the form of thought, he
reasons, because religion must aspire to be conclusive ;
whereas thought, in these matters, is necessarily incon-
clusive. The religious object, in order to fulfil the re-
quirements of the religious life, must possess finality
(no complaint here of the * rigidity' of ideas), must
furnish "an absolute and objective conclusion for our
knowledge " : but no ideas in the field of religion can
claim these qualities. However comprehensive they
may be, reality in its infinitude breaks away from them*
What satisfaction in idea can there be for religion un-
less, for example, we can frame valid ideas of " God,"
and of " the world " ? But this we cannot do. What
is to be meant by " the world " but a symbol for a com-
pleted work of fact-finding and law-finding brought to
perfect unity? — which work shows no sign of being
finished till Doomsday, and can by no right be treated
as done before that time. Indeed, the finding of a prin-
ciple which could unify the physical world-laws alone
seems to be inherently impossible, involving endless re-
treat of the object, endless regress, endless rainbow
pursuit. As for the idea of God, there is no need to
question completion when so much question besets our
poor beginnings. And were we able to think both God
and the world, this would not satisfy the requirement
of religion, which (if it depends on ideas) must have
some idea of the relation between its God and its world :
whereas, any supposition we make, or perhaps that can
be made, only plunges us into further infinities. Not
1 Philosophy of Religion, chapter n.

92 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

accidental unfinishedness, but inherent unfinishableness
of this God-and-world-problem, is what we face. By
whatever concept we try to compass finality, reality
opens through its wall an alley of " infinite regress,"
and escapes — mocking. " All limiting concepts contain
a certain element of raillery." Thus instructed by the
self-invited discomfiture of the idea, does religion pass
(through analogy and symbol) to its secure seat in feel-
ing, with its postulate of faith, — " the conservation of
value."

We cannot but endorse this conception of religion's
demand for finality in its objects. Have we not already
described religion as "anticipated attainment"; reach-
ing ends (of which the world-knowing end is one) for
which men must otherwise infinitely wait. But because
we accept that demand, we cannot despair of it ; nor
resort to feeling for a finality denied to the idea. I
shall not by any means attempt here to do justice to
Hoff ding's thought in its deeper bearings; I can deal
only with the one difficulty, — the finitude of the idea,
the infinitude of the task of knowledge.

Consider first, that all ideas contain an infinity, —
though an uncounted infinity. Within the contour of
the blank circle-face alone is there not an infinitude of
points? — which infinitude does not render less serene
our finished possession of the circle's meaning. In a tree,
there are leaves which could be counted, also cells, atoms,
infinite infinitesimals ; but my idea of that tree does not
await the result of the counting and studying. Every
idea, at that instant in which it is distinguished from
other meanings of the mind, is finished at once, from
its inner end, its intention : at that instant the universe

THE ALLEGED FINITUDE OF IDEAS 93

is dichotomized, even to its borders (as a bill may be-
come law throughout a nation at the stroke of the clock)
— though the work of its application be never finished,
or so much as entered upon. No consideration of the
immensity of the object, nor of the long labor or im-
possible labor of finished acquaintance, can balk the ease
and timeless facility of the idea. No one shall tell me
that my ideas of Russia, or of physics, or of walrus, or
of my friend, are but feelings because my ignorance of
them is measured only by eternal time : if at the name
I know to what object that name refers, I have a valid
idea of that infinite object. In international affairs, a
State may be recognized and dealt with if it has but a
determinate place and foreign office : all else may be
problematic — population, extent, resource, even gov-
ernment. An idea likewise has existence and standing
when it has a determinate place in the mind, determin-
ate external relations (distinctions from other ideas) :
internal exploration, development, spinning out of
treaty web-work, may pursue its own slow course.

One sort of completion, and one only, an idea must
have — the complete distinction and identification of
its interest (or of its problem) : it must be an individ-
ual interest in a mind-full of interests. One sort of fini-
tude it must have and one only: the finitude of not
being the only idea in the mind, of having a genuine
exterior, a wholly mental exterior, of other interests.
So far as the idea's object is concerned, it seems to me
doubtful whether there are any finite ideas at alL
Choose your idea of the minutest possible object, an
object defined as being without internal detail, atom-
atom : this poorest idea in the mind must, like other

94 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

ideas, be on duty forever, ready for infinite recurrences
of its object — which possible infinitude is already part
of the sense of the idea. So with our ocean water-bucket,
which, though it would, cannot close to itself the prospect
of endless other buckets-full ; a vista involved in its own
limited cubic contents. So with all other ideas ; they
must contemplate an infinitude of application having
a rough inverse proportion to their own internal poverty.
Indeed, I am prepared to say that the chief function
of an idea is to serve as a vessel, or as a center of
attachment, for infinite growth of knowledge: that
any idea not infinitely capacious, infinitely ambitious, is
already a dead idea. To the question, Can we think
the Infinite? let me propose the answer, We think
nothing else.

Religious ideas, then, have nothing to fear from the
general charge of infinite ambition. But perhaps the
real occasion for the diffidence of the candid-humble
philosopher is not so much infinite contents per se as it
is the special case of infinity involved in totality : for
the religious idea (of God, or of world, or of eternity)
must be in its own way all-comprehensive. Ideas may
have an internal infinitude, and beside this an infinite
swath of application ; but all this is as nothing to the
infinitude beyond their interest: the dark stretching
expanses of reality left out by all ideas — not-x to aU
of them.

In meeting this objection, it is fair to notice that in
describing this unlighted region, not-x to every idea,
one has made it or confessed it a definable interest, al-
ready an object of idea. Some marginal interest always

THE ALLEGED FINITUDE OF IDEAS 95

goes to the not-x o£ whatever idea, — which marginal
interest, heaping up from all ideas on any region which
is not-x to all of them, must acquire much positive weight
in time. But this observation hardly satisfies the objector,
and ought not to satisfy him, — nor the defendant either :
for the religious interest in the Whole is no marginal
interest ; and the supposed religious attainment of whole-
knowledge no dim reflected luminosity. The religious
idea will be as positive and primordial as any ; will in-
sist that it is possible for idea to begin with the Whole,
as readily as with any fragment. The real source of
doubt lies in some unclearness about the way in which
knowledge grows. We must give some attention to that.

It is not a true account of knowledge to say that it
proceeds (always) from the part to the whole. The pro-
gress of knowledge has rather more in common with the
development of a germ-cell than with the building of a
brick wall; something of the whole present and active
in that cell from the beginning. But we must always re-
ject helpful metaphors, inimical metaphors unless we bun-
dle them off in time, and refer to the idea itself : we may
draw a line about a germ-cell — none about a germ-
thought; an idea of the universe can never have been
wrapped up in small compass for gradual unfolding; we
do not learn to see space little by little. The child's space
is as great as the man's, — namely, whole-space. He who
comes into the world at all comes at once into the pres-
ence of the whole world. I am introduced to a person,
not by piecemeal, but all at once, with a positive im-
pression and judgment contained in my idea : not deny-
ing that there is much to learn and correct through

96 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

long-growing acquaintance. So of my introduction to
reality : in its full infinity and wholeness it is now be-
fore me and lias been so from my conscious beginning,
the same from birth to death — the same space, the same
time, the same natural order and particularity, the same
history and social context, the same God, too, if there be
a god, the same world-laws or law, the same conditions
of life and death, success and failure.

What grows in knowledge is the under-standing of
all this, the internal complexity and detail, middle-world
experience and thereby middle-world ideas, and espe-
cially the power to put ideas together. That fundamental
difference already noticed between having an idea and
having it in terms of other ideas, between knowing your
object and reasoning about it, is here again in evidence :
for the great volume and business of what we call the
growth of knowledge is growth of connection, growth
of treaty-making between ideas. (Each such new treaty-
connection is doubtless itself a new idea — as we count
ideas — and brings with it internal development of the
ideas thus newly related, but without altering their
place in the mind, which place is their identity). The
connecting of ideas goes on apace : for our loquacious,
marketable knowledge is in proportion, not immediately
to our ideas, but to the couplings we can make among
them, unions as of subject and predicate. Every new
bit of experience, taken in idea, makes chance and
demand for new couplings, — couplings, in fact, with
all previously present ideas : such a process has no end
— of all possible couplings only a relative few can be
effected. Meanwhile, knowledge keeps getting smaller
and finer, more tangled, more systematic all the time :

THE ALLEGED FINITUDE OF IDEAS 97

there are more threads and pins in the loom, more shut-
tles in the air. Such is the general aspect o£ the growth
of knowledge — a mid-world growth as we have said.
But with what does all the growth and weaving begin?
In the beginning was at least the Loom ; and always
remains, the simple-total frame of things. Huge, inevit-
able, abiding Loom, loom-motion and loom-law : these,
we may say, are given ; stuff also to weave with, and
withal the command to weave. Such total world-fact,
always present in idea, contains the growth of know-
ledge — is not in its wholeness any mere final achieve-
ment thereof.

The whole, then, is knowable : is the one thing per-
manently known. Any first idea of any dawning con-
sciousness, whatever its stimulus-object, must be at the
same time idea-of-the-whole, never to forsake that con-
sciousness while it remains such. But there is no lack
of growth and change in this idea. Once given a whole-
idea as a positive possession, every addition to know-
ledge must add to it also ; every change in the intricate
structure of mid-world knowledge must have some
answering effect upon it. Suggestions about the char-
acter of the world as a whole are continually steaming
up from the general intellectual workshop ; since every
idea that man gains casts some reflection or other upon
that world. Every other idea, let me say, is a possible
predicate for that permanent subject ; that is to say, a
possible commentary upon its nature and character.

And men have always been eager to bring their new
knowledges in all fields into connection with their whole-
idea, framing new judgments about it. Thus the repu-

98 KELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

tation of the whole is always in the making : there is no
absolute stability in the qualities or predicates which
have been attached to it — as whether it is just or
unjust; caring about men or not-caring; unconscious
perhaps or super-conscious ; unitary, or struggling for
unity, or a mere scene of struggle. In so far as our
knowledge of the whole comes through such judgments
from the progress of our day's-work, bringing explicit
predicates to that whole-idea, that knowledge of the
whole might well be subject to greater contingency than
any other. And this consideration, I think, may help
us to understand the historical instability of religious
thought. As the growth of other knowledge falls into
tangle, it suggests discordant predicates for the whole ;
and judgments once secure fall into doubt, to be set
up again later with greater assurance and added mean-
ing, or to make room for some truer judgment. Intel-
lectual business is, as we have seen, an eminently dust-
raising pursuit : it seems at times as if our whole-idea,
which like all permanences is non-intrusive, were pas-
sively obliterated in the general murk; as though we
might lose not only the predicates, but the subject
as well.

Herein, no doubt, lies the advantage of the child in
religion : not greater power, but a freer atmosphere.
To some extent, intellectual advance must always involve
loss to religion: readjustments within the whole-idea
are required ; the simplicity and firmness of our former
predicates are disturbed ; the solid proportions of the
whole-idea of childhood can with difficulty, or never,
be recovered. One sees in part why religion and ' in-
tellect ' are prone to fall into contrast. For the reli*

THE ALLEGED FINITUDE OP IDEAS 99

gious idea suffers whatever genuine losses are involved
in all progress ; and furthermore cannot be clearly dis-
cerned amid the bustle of scientific labor : it needs in a
measure to be looked-away-to ; it is best found in the
pauses of the weaving process, a matter for the most
part of holiday survey.

The whole-idea, then, while ever present, has its
vicissitudes, its fortune to make and ever re-make, its
frequent seeming life and death struggles. It is no
idle spectator of mental progress, but partaker of all
mind-growth, mind-revolution. And all this is consis-
tent with, nay implies, the truth that this same infinite
whole-idea is that with which every rational existence
begins.

CHAPTEE IX
THE RETREAT INTO SUBJECTIVITY

IT needs still to be explained what positive character
this whole-idea can have, if no predicate can perma-
nently adhere to it. The instability of any given predi-
cate must often appear as evidence that the idea in ques-
tion is impossible: on this account our whole-idea has
often been put down as a no-idea : everything, so far as
idea can grasp it, being equivalent to nothing. The
mystic has often been charged with this conclusion,
even while he maintains as the true mystic must that his
whole-idea is the most positive of all.

In spite of the difficulty of fixing predicates for the
whole, circumstantial evidence does strongly discoun-
tenance the notion that the idea is a negation, or a pure
problem : for hardly would such persistent ferment and
vicissitude center about it, if there were no positive
individual interest and content at stake. The most
striking circumstance in the history of this idea is not, I
think, that all predicates have been beaten back ; but
that in spite of all difficulties the assault continues,
unremitting, through all mental eras. And if it were
true ( as it is not) that in this persistent attempt to cap-
ture the whole in predicate-idea no single predicate had
gained permanent hold — all of them struck down by
Something — we should still judge this fact the poorest
possible evidence of Nothing There ! When we reject

THE RETREAT INTO SUBJECTIVITY 101

a predicate, it is because we know, better than this pred-
icate can say, what the character of our world is.

The principle here chiefly concerned is this : that the
denial of any predicate does not leave 'behind no-predi-
cate; a simple enough principle, but much hindered by
mechanical ideas of ideas — for the erasure of a circle
does certainly leave behind precisely no-circle in its
place. If however I deny an idea, I leave behind end-
less possibilities, or even responsibilities, some of which
are very near to the negated idea itself. For instance,
I deny that potatoes are red or that the Earth is a
sphere : yet these denials leave possible much redness in
potatoes and much roundness in the Earth's shape. So
when discordant opinions cancel each other, what is left
is no mere feeling, but some very real idea, if we can but
name it. Neither the whole-idea nor any other is at
first quality-less, getting its character by the attach-
ment of predicate after predicate from without : a new
predicate does no more than express what was and has
been true of the subject, not hitherto say-able, but
needing and requiring to be said. The retreat into
subjectivity (for that is what the feeling-resort is)
means an abandonment of the effort and responsibility
of naming the idea that is tenable, letting subject as
well as predicate sink beneath the threshold waters of
conscious existence.

A rough parallel may show this : religious opinions dif-
fer from age to age and from people to people hardly
more than do the foods of these same ages and peoples.
Have we then any positive, objective, food-idea — since
scarcely anything used in one place would not be re-
jected in some other? — shall we not say that the real

102 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

meaning of food is a feeling of some sort, say of
hunger and the relief thereof ? Doubtless this feeling-
sequence is a constant amid all the variations of menu,
and enters into the meaning of the term ; but there is
another constant, amid all the varieties of foods, — and
thatis/ood — physical, eatable, digestible object-matter,
as well as subject-matter. Behind every such diversity
of idea, there is an identity of feeling (which it is well
to note) ; but also — an identity of Idea. Men may
lose their gods, and have God left. Behind Indra and
his drivers is Prajapati ; and behind Prajapati, there
is Brahm.

It is fair to observe, also, that the displacement of old
predicates by new (admittedly an infinite process, in the
case of our whole-idea, or of our God-idea) does not im-
ply the essential falsity of the old. There are among
predicates no precise fittings of any subject, nor yet
precise mis-fittings (if a predicate wholly coincides
with its subject, it ceases to be a garment therefor):
what is fit depends upon what is required. My predi-
cates hurled at Deity and the World are like broad mis-
siles that hit the mark — and more : as my marksman-
ship becomes finer I may adopt finer weapons, substitute
arrows for clubs and stones, but still hit only the same
mark. I cannot accuse my stone-and-club-throwing
successes of substantial error, but only of rudeness, of
anachronism if persisted in. Arrows too must be dis-
placed— in time perhaps by light-rays: yet each, in
its own way, may strike true. Nothing in all this diffi-
culty of predicates then (even if it were, which it is
not, a pure chaos), need justify the abandonment of the
whole-idea as a no-idea, at most a feeling.

THE RETREAT INTO SUBJECTIVITY 103

It is not our present purpose to say what we know
about the World or about God ; we are enquiring only
whether such knowledge is possible, and how it is possi-
ble. So far as explicit predicates of the whole are con-
cerned, our answer may now be put in this way : If
there are any permanent achievements of knowledge in
any direction, in the progress of science and the Arts,
every such achievement may be the basis of an equally
stable judgment about the whole. At one time, we were
questioning whether the emergence of the Arts were
not the silencing of religion : we may now see that it is
the emergence of the Arts that chiefly aids, and even
compels, religion to become vocal. When the Arts had
no language, religion herself was necessarily helpless,
un-literal, speaking the speech of myth and figure, lack-
ing fixed objective moorings. The question of truth
in religion did not arise, and could not consciously arise,
until there had come into the world an independent
science, philosophy, art, and artisanry . Now that these
have made good their independent faculties, they lend
to religion their new-made powers: religion becomes
articulate in the same measure in which she gives artic-
ulateness to the world.

We have, then, a growing body of positive know-
ledge about the whole, as well as a permanent whole-
idea as subject of these judgments. But it remains true
that all knowledge of the whole is of the simplest order.
In the presence of the ultimate we shall always remain
primitive : we can never become civilized in respect to
God. All our accounts of the larger realities fall back
in language to the elements of speech, the rudiments of

104 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

numbers, the conceptions of infantile mechanics.1 Child-
hood lies always within our reach, as we pass outward
from the world in which we move with skill (because
we have set up in it the stage and reaction-board suited
to meet our powers) into the field of the larger interests
of the cosmos. It is because of this necessary simplicity,
and not because the type of hold we have on these larger
interests is not a grip of idea, that we bow our minds
in well-considered humility as we approach the infinite,
that religion belies itself when it expands in verbiage.
For speech, at its best, is only partial wisdom ; whereas
the wisdom of religion is entire.

But as for this other humility — that of the candid,
humble philosopher, who will have no idea of the infi-
nite, especially of the Total-infinite — that is, in truth,
the poorest virtue in the catalogue. A labor-saving vir-
tue, I fear: also at times, sadly enough, a guilty virtue,
parting too readily with its birthright. Such a thing
there is as impatience in knowledge, also presumption ;
not to be cured however by renouncing courage, effort,
and withal the capital-possession of humanity — the idea
which with simplicity embraces and knows the infinite.
Every living infinite-total, and not the world only, has
for knowledge this same unitary-simplicity ; the Person,
Nature, Society, History, the State: the knowledge of
these, open to the "poor in spirit," is the justification
of democracy, of modern life at large. We are not
human until we claim and use these ideas-infinite, the
essential organs of a genuine personal life.

1 We may notice a similar thing in all the maxima of life — say in
world-politics, whose " depths and intricacies " are chiefly the mysteries of
closed doors, whose " complex principles " chiefly the abstruse policies of
boys and savages.

THE RETREAT INTO SUBJECTIVITY 105

It remains true also — and what we have been saying
will help to explain the fact — that religious knowledge,
of the kind with which revelation and prophecy are con-
cerned, is not commonly found in the course of theoret-
ical reflection. That which so profoundly stirs feeling
has been in its psychological origin a product of some-
thing very like feeling, and very different from common
thought. Abeyance of ingenuity, a fostered passivity,
reliance upon the primitive in the mind, the coopera-
tion of what psychology prefers to call the subconscious
and instinctive : all such non-thinking has been requisite
for winning truth about super-nature. To retire into
the wilderness for forty days, to make yourself pure and
empty, to throw off your skill and your shrewdness, to
forget the proportions of men and of men's outlooks :
these have been found fit preparations for the reception
of prophecy. But let us be clear that this negation of
common thought-activity, the intense passion and sub-
jectivity of religion thus shown, is but a measure of the
immense scope of its intention. The most inner is called
on only to reach the most outer. The bow-string is
pulled in to its limit only that the shaft may also reach
its limit.

Religious wisdom impresses us as an affair for the
subconscious subject because it stirs subconscious
depths : an impression which the psychological attitude
can hardly shake off; yet the inference is exactly
topsy-turvy.

Nothing can stir the " depths " of mind, but total out-
of-doors. We call " depth," last dregs, etc., that in man
which only ultimate facts and happenings can interest;
that which the near and usual can neither rouse nor

106 EELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

ruffle. Somewhere in each man, we imagine, there lies
an ultimatum, to be backed by all his energies from all
reservoirs, ordinary and extraordinary, — what can elicit
from any man such ultimatum and ultimatum-backing ?
— nothing that has not somewhere in it the word
All! There are such things, we think, as ruling pas-
sions, " deepest desires," in any man some nameable or
unnameable last ambition — what can set such a depth
on fire? — nothing but some total opportunity (real
or believed real), discovered in the wide world
beyond the self.

Drama, dreaming likewise, can detach itself at once
from reality and power of excitement : but objectivity is
the very food of passion. Passion necessarily realizes ;
apart from some experience of passion one hardly knows
what/ac£ is.

Eeligious passion, at length, is the best illustration
of all this: for this is the mark of religious passion,
that a specific view of the whole makes conscious con-
nection with one's practical ultimata. The "deepest
of all inborn impulses," says Professor Pratt,1 " is the
' instinct for self-preservation ' " : and what is to set that
impulse trembling? — " a belief in the impossibility of
real annihilation." Belief founded on what ? — founded
back on the instinct itself ? — doomed then to death
and silence. Founded on vision perhaps ? If ever upon
the stupid day-length time-span of any self, or saint
either, some vision breaks to roll his life and ours into
new channels, it can only be because that vision admits
into his soul some trooping invasion of the concrete
fulness of eternity. Such vision doubtless means sub-

1 Psychology of Religious Belief, p. 292.

THE RETREAT INTO SUBJECTIVITY 107

conscious readiness, and subconscious resonance too, —
but the expansion of unused air-cells does not argue
that we have ceased now to breathe the outer air: —
the very opposite !

No. The so-called wisdom of feeling is of the same
stuff and substance with other wisdom, positive, objective,
belonging to our world of ideas. The religious vista is
large and open : in integral continuity with the field-lines
of our overt existence (not narrowly caught by peering
up back-chimney-flues of consciousness). Whatever is
thus continuous with the real known in idea is itself
known in idea, — not otherwise. There are vague ideas,
and unfinished ideas, uncertain predicates, qualities only
dimly divined — known most certainly by their differ-
ence from others, their negative bearing — but none of
this haze and floating outline affects the intent and cate-
gory of the scene-contents. Whatever is, or can be,
predicate of idea is itself idea-stuff, whether or not yet
successfully defined and connected.

We have dwelt long on the question of the idea's de-
fects, the most persuasive of the supports of the religion
of feeling. For some touch of finitude must cleave to
all things human : and none of our ideas, religious or
other, can be more than the idea of some poor mortal.
Yet, we do here claim that the ideas of mortals may en-
tertain the infinite and the total as their valid objects, and
do always entertain them, though unawares. Whoever
says that the foundations of religion lie deeper than idea
speaks true : deeper, indeed, they lie than the current
idea-level; deeper than most of our predicates, taken as
these are chiefly from the sphere of the day's work.

108 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

The result we have reached is simply that deeper than
idea is Idea. There is nothing of reality, whether the
infinitude of its livingness and change, or the infinitude
of its extent, to which we must be related through feel-
ing because of the incapacity of idea. Eetreat to the
inner man (retreat for which idealism has itself set the
example) is not imposed upon us by any yet-mentioned
defects of our organs of knowledge or, let me say, is not
permitted to us : driven back from any stated idea, we
must still remain in the idea-world.

CHAPTER X

THE IDEA-WORLD IN ITS AIM TOWARD FREEDOM
FROM FEELING

ASSUME, then, that we have overcome the most seri-
ous and actual of the obstacles to our confidence
in the possibility of knowledge in religion. Let us agree
that religious feeling, in its necessary effort to win a
theory of its own meaning, is not inevitably balked by the
incompetence of our organs of knowledge, the ideas. If
we can accept this as a definite result, though wholly gen-
eral and preliminary, we have dealt with one half of the
problem which the religion of feeling puts before us. An-
other half remains : for while we must try to work out a
religious theory and have good hope of success, it may
still be true that the vitality of religion lies in the feel-
ing and not in the idea. As long as our ideas retain
their living connection with the feelings which they are
naturally meant to guide, they are sound : but idea has
a way of severing that connection and setting up as a
thing separate and sufficient in itself. We have ourselves
asserted that feeling tends to vanish as idea becomes
more adequate: and yet it is certain that religion with-
out feeling is nothing. All feeling needs idea; but it
does not follow that all idea needs feeling or can win it :
in fixing attention upon the idea, we are in danger of
detaching ourselves from the sources of life.

It is idle to deny that he impoverishes himself who

110 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND EELIGIOUS THEORY

tries to live by idea alone. What we have to do is to
study this evident tendency of idea to separate from
feeling and become external. We cannot doubt the
tendency, though we may doubt whether it is the last
word in regard to their relations. The union between
idea and feeling seems to me to be organic, not acci-
dental or external, so that idea in the last resort can no
more free itself from feeling than feeling can free itself
from idea. But whatever may be the nature of this
union, it is not to be found by minimizing the fact that
the world of ideas does aspire to be independent of the
current flux of feelings. We must rather give full scope
and credit to this aim, and think it through to its con-
clusions. What, then, we first ask, seems to be the
nature of that ideal of independence?

In the first place an idea must be permanent, whereas
feeling is essentially transient. An idea may guide a
feeling to its goal and its cessation ; but as the experi-
ence passes, the idea does not cease to exist, — as for
example the idea of food when I am not hungry. On
the contrary, it seems now to begin its most character-
istic existence as idea.

For the more common uses of the idea, in memory,
in reflection, in communication, are best fulfilled when
the idea can be referred to without unnecessary stirring
of subjective interests and emotions. We want our ideas
fco be so held in the mind that any vital connection with
feeling must come as an additional fact. We want them
so far insulated from ourselves that whatever their mo-
mentary importance may be or become, we must first
make an application to our own case by a separate act

IDEA SEEKING FREEDOM FBOM FEELING 111

of inference. Picture me a destroyed San Francisco :
this is a fact distantly regrettable, but still a mere fact :
but remind me now that I have friends there, or invest-
ments, and immediately the bond with feeling is accom-
plished. Apart from such separate act of application the
idea exists in its normal freedom, fit to be dealt with in
what we call the purely theoretical manner, the charac-
teristic life of the idea.

In this theoretical condition any idea of mine finds
itself in a permanent and fairly complete world of ideas.
This idea- world at any moment must contain the idea-
concerns for all possible feelings, past and future — not
merely for those accidentally present ; and even to some
extent for all mankind, not for myself alone, in so far
as I undertake to understand the feelings of all man-
kind through my own magazine of ideas. Only a few of
these ideas can be in use at any time; for feeling is
nothing unless present feeling ; hence for the most part
one's idea-world stands undisturbed by feeling, a liberal
and adequate field for free conscious existence. Were
it not possible to lift the eyes from the movement of
affairs in course to other idea-regions without at once
experiencing the full feeling-effect of these ideas, human
life could scarcely move in any such roomy spiritual
place as it now possesses. The permanent and instant
command of our whole-view is perhaps the distinguish-
ing mark of our species. Whatever independence of
feeling is implied in this undisturbed access to every
idea-meaning is the clear tendency and purpose of the
idea-world, and to a great extent an already accom-
plished fact.

And further, whatever we can call a spiritual posses-

112 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

sion has its place here. For surely we should give reli-
gion, or any other human interest, both ampler and
firmer terrain by establishing it in this permanent idea-
world than if we could find for it, so to speak, only a
sea-faring life on the incessantly shifting surface of
feeling. Whatever is to be established in this world
must be established in idea, for only the idea admits
of establishment.

And now, in the second place, this free theoretical
status of the idea in memory and reflection becomes an
ideal even for the use of the idea in concrete cognitive
experience, in so far as this too has a theoretical aim.
We are sufficiently familiar with the way in which feel-
ing interferes with this work, mars the equanimity of its
operation, and warps its results. This work must be
done in a certain equilibrium of mind, an equilibrium
whose difficulty is itself a testimony to the strong natu-
ral bond between idea and feeling. But this equilibrium
is possible, at least as an ideal, and it is this ideal that
now concerns us. Through the need to be anti-emotional,
the attitude which we call the empirical attitude takes
on a definite moral aspect. What we will to know is
reality, and reality is a word having the force of feel-
ing-rebuke— "stern reality" is its name.

Thus, in sum, our ideas have many other uses than
those of the immediate guidance of present feelings ;
and for all these other uses a freedom from feeling-
entanglements is as desirable as in its own place a ready
union with feeling is desirable. There is a liberality
about idea which does not comport with its being always
in harness to feeling ; and the idea cannot be identified
with a relation which now appears to be but a special

IDEA SEEKING FREEDOM FROM FEELING 113

and occasional relation. The idea is normally independ-
ent of the flux of feelings. But has not this independ-
ence some further and more general relation to feeling?

There is no doubt that it has a further account to
give. This power to hold our ideas in theoretical equi-
librium is no mechanical matter; it is a hard-won
accomplishment, and it becomes marked only in the
higher stages of evolution and of culture. It is an ac-
quisition of much importance, having a decided biologi-
cal value as well as the general spiritual interest which
we have suggested. This status of the idea is thus itself
a matter in which our feelings must be in some way
deeply involved. Very likely the apparently independent
idea is but a pseudo-independent idea ; a highly explic-
able, and even copiously explained, product of evolution.

There is certainly little agreement at present as to
the exact sequence and description of the stages of men-
tal evolution ; but there is some approach to agreement
in the opinion that the theoretical use of idea is a com-
paratively late invention of nature's and a thoroughly
practical and instrumental affair. Primitive idea-making
is seemingly most un-theoretical; and developed idea-
making is at bottom the same, though under high dis-
guise. There is a well-known theory to the effect that
all ideas, in the last resort, mean some action or plan
of action; so that in their very meanings they are bound
up with the feelings which normally announce and ac-
company those actions. Through whatever remote and
devious paths the idea in question finds its way into
practice, its whole significance can be reduced to the
difference in conduct which belief in its object tends to

114 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

provoke. Idea means action or purpose. This we may
call the action-theory of idea. In this theory I do not
find any complete satisfaction ; yet it moves so far in the
right direction, in bringing the theoretical idea into
relation with feeling, that it will be well to follow its path
and define our own belief with reference to it. Let me
then bring to mind a typical sketch of the evolution of
the apparently feeling-free idea, as interpreted by this
action-theory.

When the world may be simply classified for any or-
ganism into the eatable and the non-eatable, the terri-
ble and the non-terrible, idea directly means action, and
idea-difference means action-difference. Development,
which means at each stage dealing with a bigger world,
must bring into view objects whose bearing on action
is more and more indirect and distant, as f oUows :

First, we must acquire ideas of ways and means, not
of ends only. Before we can eat we must chase, and
long series of signs and way-marks must be added to
our idea-stock — all practical enough, but without orig*
inal interest in themselves.

Then it appears that some things are means to more
than one end. The same path leads home, and also leads
to water; the same water may be source of food supply
and drink supply. In such ideas the various suggestions
of action tend to cancel or inhibit each other. Many-
purposes may seem to the mind much the same as no-
purpose: here begins the apparently action-free idea.
Of this sort are most of our present stock of substan-
tive ideas, because nothing concrete has its value all in
one direction. And further, in all real objects, as in all
real men, there is a mixture of benefit and injury. The

IDEA SEEKING FREEDOM FROM FEELING 115

action-value of any concrete object taken by itself is
nearly neutral, a grey in which all colors mix.

My world extends in time and not in space only : and
as memory and prudence accompany the widening of
my world in its time-extent, I interest myself in possi-
ble values, and not alone in actual values. Every con-
crete thing, under such a broadened area of purpose,
has a speculative importance. Thus arises the idea of a
thing, the most finished achievement of our assumed
attitude of indifference. The thing has no defined sug-
gestions of action ; its reputation is all to be made ; our
value-judgment is perfectly reserved; we have become,
to all appearances, purely theoretical.

Two new emotions, caution and curiosity, mark the
upper reaches of this development; indeed, they are
probably provided by nature fairly early, but come to
flower late in that feeling which is sometimes called the
love of knowledge, which interests itself in things osten-
sibly for no other reason than that they exist. But this
love of knowledge, like all preceding stages of recession
from the immediately useful, is still practical ; it is best
regarded, perhaps, as a form of the love of power, which
in acquiring new data feels a diffused delight hailing
remotely from the sense of possible action.

" Dispassionate investigation " is an office created by
this practical curiosity. It is the best value-policy to
treat our world as if we were interested in it for its own
sake. But dramatic self-sacrifice like this does not con-
ceal the fundamental relation of all meanings to feel-
ings. Is it not a commonplace of experimental psychol-
ogy that action-shadows and fringes attend all ideas at
all times; are there not incipient, tell-tale muscular

116 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

movements always to be discovered accompanying all
thinking-movements, inhibited, but none the less verifi-
able? Supporting the proposal that some motor-outray-
ing is the essential meaning of every idea.

Theoretic use of idea, then, is a use in which we say
to the idea, in effect, "Action-meaning — yes, but not
now" And in this power of restraint or inhibition we
are mightily aided by a growing social experience, which
lends much practical significance to the attitude, "Ac-
tion-meaning— yes, but not mine." Society imposes
upon me the habit of regarding actions through the eyes
and muscles of others : I learn to regard objects irre-
sponsibly, as one reads the newspaper. There is much
that excites action-impulse, — but it is not my affair, and
I check myself. The unmoving idea, the idea regarded
theoretically, is simply in a socialized condition : it is set
over into the world of an actor who is, in thought, some
one else, any one else than myself.

Thus we understand how, on purely practical consid-
erations, it comes about that we have a pseudo-independ-
ent world of ideas. Feeling does not markedly accom-
pany a thought except in so far as that thought touches
the springs of my own musculature : feeling is the idea
doing work in me. By whatever policy I can prevent
this motor-connection from being made, I add to my
power over the theoretic idea. But in all such theoretic
status, we have to recognize at bottom the fundamental
action-meaning held in abeyance, and for a limited dura-
tion. All theory is sustained throughout by a powerful
current of feeling, the interest in possible action: and any
one active impulse is prevented from displaying itself
only by other impulses which for the time rule my assent.

IDEA SEEKING FREEDOM FROM FEELING 117

This is a crude and over-simple account of the action-
theory of idea-meaning, such as I will attribute to no
one thinker. For our purposes it sufficiently represents
the view in question.

Suggestive of much truth is this evolutionary pic-
ture ; showing the existence of some close bond between
all idea and all action : yet not on the whole a just picture.
It seems to reduce the idea everywhere to the service
of action : but in all justice it only shows the idea in
its struggle for independence hampered at the edges
by the persistent fringes of action. The rightful infer-
ence, I venture to say, from such evolution-tracing must
show idea connected with feeling universally indeed —
but still externally, as to something intrinsically differ-
ent. Idea, we find, is always accompanied by feeling:
will have various feeling-promptings, hints of valuable
action, associated with it — by way of annex ; but still
always as additional and extraneous fact. Every idea-
object must indeed have some appeal to the imagina-
tion, its vividness depending largely on these communi-
cating rills of value-fancy, more or less overt. But the
idea-meaning remains that-upon-wliioli these value-fan-
cies turn, that-from-which these action-vistas open out:
is itself something else than these fringe-leadings ; can-
not by any evidence so far brought forward be identi-
fied with them, as value-meaning or action-meaning.

From the beginning, our ideas give cues to action, but
they give, it seems, always somewhat more than the cue :
and in this somewhat-more they seek to lodge their
meaning — not in the accompanying cue to action. Thus
the idea of wine carries with it very definite suggestion

US RELIGIOUS FEELING AND BELIGIOUS THEORY

of action — wine is something to be drunk : yet wine
cannot be so defined and identified. Wine must be de-
fined, officially and otherwise, by its relation to the grape,
ultimately by its root in nature: apart from this particu-
lar source in nature wine is not wine, though perfectly
imitating all possible wine-feelings and wine-reactions.
To lodge meanings somewhere in Nature seems to guar-
antee their genuineness ; as if all meanings must be
made to touch base in a region of indifference before
they may spin lawful alliances with feeling and action.

Nature is the typical region for the feeling-free
anchorage of the meanings of ideas. But this region of
indifference can be more generally described. If we
have to make a distinction between ideas (as of wine from
vinegar, friend from foe) we can do this only by mak-
ing, or having, an idea of the common ground which
these objects occupy: which common basis (common
man-shape of friend and foe, common white granule mass
of salt and sugar), precisely not to be acted upon,
becomes the refuge of hesitation. Refuge of hesitation,
however, just because common ground, will constitute
the stem from which the divergent idea-meanings must
spring. Whatever the impulsive foreground of idea,
there will thus necessarily be a non-impulsive back*
ground, and in this our idea-meanings will rest.1

This non-impulsive background gives its character
to the foreground also : our action-cues are but features
belonging to it, only fortunately and accidentally avail-

1 In symbol : we distinguish between z-conduct and y-conduct, not by
means simply of #-idea and y-idea ; but by means first of a non-motor idea,
A, capable of the varieties Ax and Ay. The -4-idea is, in practice, only
relatively non-motor ; but since the formula is entirely general, it indicates
an ultimate purely non-motor basis of meanings.

IDEA SEEKING FREEDOM FROM FEELING 119

able for our discriminations. Through serving all idea-
differenees, this background looms large ; background
and all foregrounds merge into one vast non-impulsive
World-object, infinite complex magazine of object-fields
and field-contents : — space-field, cosmic force-field, spec-
trum-series, tone-scale, effort-scale; human-desire-gamut,
too, taken as objective fact; social scale, moral-value
field, and many others, together with all their contents
and the motions thereof; all motions and changes of
contents against one ultimate background-field of
infinite time ; all contents rooted in one ultimate back-
ground-stuff, which we may call — problematically —
Substance. Infinite complex magazine, capable of serv-
ing all action-differences actual and possible, yet with
infinite unused resource, superior to and apart from all
such use, — essentially unused by it. Such World-
object, in its complexity, is partially summarized in our
idea of Nature ; more completely, as objective Keality,
whose problematic Substance sets the last goal for all
idea-meanings.

In such external World-fact do our idea-meanings seek
lodgment ; as if, I repeat, it were necessary to touch the
passionless ground of things, before affiliating with any
particular actions and feelings. The structure of the
whole system of ideas and actions becomes indirect,
triangular: there may be no direct passage from per-
ception to action, but perception must first be related
to substance, and from substance pass on to action —
with freedom of will.

Now this idea of a non-impulsive background, which
at last gets the mysterious name of Substance, the

120 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

external goal of all idea-meanings, is in no zoise a re-
sult of development. It is rather the aboriginal fact of
consciousness. Environment, and environment complex-
ity, have extended immeasurably ; but externality has
become no whit more external. From the beginning,
our idea-making must have held itself in independence
of impulse. For without such prior independence, action
development could not so much as begin. We are able
to find cues for divergent lines of action, because loe
have already been interested in something else than
the actively important features of our world. *

Nature has early separated the organs of perception
from the organs of action ; and in the freedom of per-
ception, with its liberality of interest, care-free play and
exploration, idea-making has freedom also. Idea-outlin^
ing follows shapes, perceptive unities and uses, not the
unities and uses of our own action. Perception shows
us, we think, the immediate clothing of Substance ; and
shares in that externality which idea-meaning requires.
Perception is no doubt to be regarded biologically as a
means of adaptation : but as such alone it must be judged
immeasurably wasteful, supplying us with entire fields,
infinite manifolds of objects, in order that a few dis-
criminations may be made (supplying also that whole
super-useful region of perceptive beauty, whose extraor-

1 Especially is the idea, of the thing-with-various-uses visibly depend-
ent on such liberality of interest. For if idea meant to us just so much ac-
tion-plan and nothing more, action routes might cross ad libitum without
ever exciting any knowledge of the fact of their crossing. The notion of an
intersection presupposes an interest in the lines for their own sake, in some
independence of the ends reached by those lines. Thus we know water as
the same thing in this use and in that only because in any use of it char-
acters other than those used have freely engaged our attention ; qualities
appealing to eye, touch, and the like.

IDEA SEEKING FREEDOM FROM FEELING 121

dinary art-development escapes so far from biological
explanation).

In spite of all important evidence showing to what
extent perception-interest is governed by active-interest,
it remains true that in idea-outlining perception has a
prior and independent head. So much so, that when we
make to ourselves ideas of activities themselves, we in-
cline to make them in terms of "external" perceptions,
rather than in their own proper coin (for instance, our
idea of walking, which represents to us commonly walk'
ing-as-seen, attribute of outer Substance, rather than
walking-as-inwardly-known in terms of feeling and
impulsiveness, attribute of Self). Feeling and action
find in the perception-substance-world some requisite
mise-en-scene ; varieties of feeling and action find here
a unity, coherence, relatedness, intelligibility, which on
their own ground they lack ; especially, they find here
unlimited room to grow in, the dome of perception never
narrowed down to the scope, or even the prospective
scope, of conduct.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the ideas we make
as ideas of single objects should show no close corres*
pondence to action-need; should share in the super-
abundance of the perceptive fields themselves. From a
given desire can never be inferred the idea of the
object which does, in concrete fact, satisfy that desire
(from thirst alone, what actual beverage can be deduced).
Ideas, we say, do by aboriginal instinct fix their mean-
ing in the ultimate non-impulsive Substance of the world ;
and idea-outlining tends to follow the hints which per-
ception gives of the unities belonging to that reality-not-
ourselves.

122 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

But here we encounter a type of demurrer, leading
direct to the heart of the matter. Idea-outlining accord-
ing to perception-unities is not, we are told, so independ-
ent of action-reference as we suppose. Ideas are made
not indeed in the interest of specific actions, but still
in the interest of types of action of very general sort.
Spatially closed figures are regarded as single things,
because solid outlines form, in general, the limiting lines
of our own physical movements (consideration finely
employed by Bergson). Detachable and movable ob-
jects, especially moving objects, have evident biological
importance ; are indefinitely liable to concern one's own
vital status : must naturally become practical idea-units.

Significant here is not so much the interest alleged
(which is real enough, but still demonstrably after the
fact, still external) as the immense generality of the
interest Why may I not say, on the same basis, that
objects interest me, because forsooth objectivity-in-gen-
eral is practically portentous ? What is to give into the
hands of biological induction terms of just such high
generality ("spatially detachable objects," "moving
objects," " physical bodies," " forces," etc.) as expressive
of that in which momentous issues reside ; what if not
some prior idea? May we not say just this : that per-
ception generalizes the conditions of conduct; provides
generalization in advance ; and is able to do this because
of its relation to our original idea of Substance ? What
fundamentally interests men is, in truth, just reality
— nothing more special, nothing less. Around this orig-
inal meaning gather all practical concerns ; in this all
importances are funded. Interest in reality is the idea-
making, idea-outlining function of the human mind.

IDEA SEEKING FREEDOM FROM FEELING 123

Interest in What Exists, not more because it is mine
than because it is nofr-mine. Doubtless all practical
motives lend their weight to this peculiar limiting inter-
est ; but it is not constituted by them. Some passion for
objectivity, for reality, for Substance, quite prior to
other passions, there is at the bottom of all idea ; a
passion not wholly of an unreligious nature, not wholly
un-akin to the love of God.

The nature of that passion, if we could know it, would
afford the answer to our question regarding the organic
union between idea and feeling. It is an inability to
believe in the possibility of such a passion, a passion
for what is merely because it is, that closes the way to
that solution. It is by accepting the apparent paradox
that we shall now come to our understanding of that
union.

CHAPTER XI

IDEA IN ORGANIC UNION WITH FEELING

ideas we have that do not freely mix and
entangle themselves with feeling, and lend them-
selves variously to the service of action. But all ideas,
so we have now concluded, have a natural and original
independence of those stirrings of emotion which
accompany our current activities. The child, the savage,
and no doubt also the crayfish, the sponge, the polyp,
if they are idea-builders at all, have an interest in their
world which we must call f purely theoretical/ No
creature can construct ideas except through a genuine
non-practical interest in what is around him simply
* because it is there/ Every idea, however rich in prac-
tical association, is attached in its ultimate ' external
meaning ' to the idea of reality, the center of all this
free, dispassionate interest.1

1 Whatever release any mind can win from its own present interests
and passions, for memory or reflection or scientific effort, is accomplished
through holding instinctively or consciously to its own idea of reality, or
of substance, in whatever form this idea presents itself to him. It is in
its religions form that the idea of reality has been the chief culprit in all
abstraction of the mind from the current of feeling and action. From
the beginning, religions ideas have exhibited a certain aloofness. The
seers have had their practical and moral recommendations to make ; but
in their cosmologies and theologies, in their myth-spinning generally,
they have been curiously free from relation to human values. All such
ideas have appealed to no other visible interest than this ancient interest
in reality, interest of a purely theoretical nature. I cannot defend the
religious idea against this charge, nor the metaphysical idea either. I

IDEA IN ORGANIC UNION WITH FEELING 125

And now, it is here if at all, in this center of the
idea's independence, that we shall find the essential
union between idea and feeling. For that same idea of
reality which has so little to do with the beginnings of
our actions, and the stirrings of feeling that accompany
those beginnings, has as I believe everything to do with
the building of their ends. The values which our ac-
tions aim at seem to me to be the direct and continuous
creation of that idea. How this is the case is a simple
matter if we can win the right view of it j but the win-
ning of that view has its own difficulty.

Our actions drive on incessantly to their ends, and
these ends we call values. We take these values, our
various human interests and concerns, for the most part
as self-justifying and self-explanatory: that this thing is
a source of pleasure, and that a source of pain, we
accept as ultimate facts, our practical first premises.
We understand, in general, that in the pursuit of these
various satisfactions, nature is luring us on to live, and to
increase life. But we seldom enquire why our living
itself is of interest to nature ; as apart from these same
values we think it would hardly be of interest to our-
selves. Our values, then, remain essentially unexplained.
They remain too without clear relation to each other.
We like beauty, and we like company ; we enjoy music,
and care for children, and appreciate a courtesy. These
are facts of instinct and human nature, and we adopt
them as our several ends. It was for the sake of winning

see and acknowledge the futility of much, perhaps most, of this curiosity-
work. But I see also in that power of detachment the worst in close
conjunction with the best.

126 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

these scattered values that we were supposed, hy the
action-theory, to be concerned in making ideas.

But if we can so readily accept these ends as final facts,
there is no need of explaining the interest in reality.
We may simply say that this also is a value, and is its own
justification ; and this is often said, as if it were enough
to say. If in our theories of human nature we no longer
think it necessary to reduce altruism to a transformed
egoism ; if we have long since learned that care for an-
other is quite as native and original as care for oneself,
that love is one of the instincts ; it can do no violence to
our scientific principles to accept the love of reality as
another instinct, an ultimate fact of value like the rest.
But it ought to do violence to our scientific principles
to fall so readily into finalities. Our values need to
be explained ; our interest in reality not more than our
interest in food or in society or in imitation. And
it is probable that if any value could be explained, they
would all fall into some sort of system. The key to that
system may well be furnished by this same interest in
reality. For in separating that interest from all others,
we have by a sort of distillation separated out as it were
an instance of pure value. We cannot explain this
interest by any other ; but we may be able to explain all
other interests by this one.

For there can be no doubt that the interest we have
in reality is somehow substantially bound up with the
interest we have in all other ends : there is a discernible
relation between the quantity of these two types of
interest. The passion poured into the construction of an
independent idea-world is in some close connection with
the sum of passion poured into the practical pursuit of all

IDEA IN ORGANIC UNION WITH FEELING 127

other things. The more interest there is in life generally,
the more devotion is spent upon knowing reality for
itself and vice versa. Let the Renaissance serve as an
illustration. If, then, the interest in reality is not derived
from the interest in other things, there is a strong sug-
gestion that the interest in other things may be derived
from the interest in reality. I have no doubt that in
actual working order dependence is mutual j that passion
spent in either pursuit becomes a cause of the zeal-
level of the other : but interest in reality has the priority.
Whatever energy is spent in understanding experience,
in attaching its meanings to the reality-idea, is so much
recoverable energy for all other valuing. If this is the
case, then work done by us on the idea is no work on
action-cues perhaps; but it is work done on the worth
of living itself, it is the creation of the very fabric of
value. Now let us consider how this may be.

It will be generally admitted that the value of any
object depends as well upon the thinker as upon the
thing. Values vary with the man ; and within the man's
life, they vary with his powers of attention, and what
he can bring to the subject. They vary with what psy-
chology has called his f apperceptive mass '; if you enjoy
Widor's music and I do not, it has something to do
with your greater knowledge and experience in the
world of music. A state of keen enjoyment is a state
of high mental activity: the resources of memory and
invention are loosened, the mind becomes a free field
for quick and accurate connections powerfully f ocussed.1

1 The same may be said of anger and of certain other negative emo-
tions. In so far as these are states of enthusiasm they are also percep-

128 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

Pleasure is evidently a mode of being aware of the
world; a way of taking and attending to things, trans-
ferable from one object to another, tending to propa-
gate itself and continue itself. Delight develops atten-
tion ; and attention develops more delight. That same
object which under a cold gaze reveals no interest may
under an eye already kindled with pleasure develop
unlimited value. Hence wit and fun once started can
sustain themselves with little fuel from outside ; any trifle
becomes a matter of extraordinary feeling. Any object
or task strenuously attended to begins to glow with
some heat of value after a while ; there is something
like spontaneous generation of values under the focus
of attention. And everything we enjoy for a moment
prepares us to like something different in the next ;
because it brings under way in us that mode of regard-
ing things wherein the secret of value lies.

In some way, then, value is conferred upon the object
by that with which we can meet it. But what is it that
a man brings with him which can determine the feeling-
worth of his world? His ' apperceptive mass/ indeed ;
and this consists of what ? Of instincts in part, organic
capacities for enjoyment? Experiences also, and all
sorts of associated fancies and memories and ideas ?
But all of this is nothing other than idea; idea being
but experience itself in all its life and infinitude pre-
pared for this very work of meeting new experience
with justice. What any conscious organism can bring
to a new experience is but its prior experience referred

tions of value and need not here be separately analyzed. The problem
of pain, and negative feeling in general, is considered in chapter

IDEA IN ORGANIC UNION WITH FEELING 129

to reality, held, that is, in idea; whether ancestral
experience, embodied in structure (instinct-idea) to be
made the individual's own by re-thinking; or his own
experience taken up into his own thought: in one case
as in the other — idea. It is this thought-over experi-
ence, experience already organized into idea, which
measures the power of any mind to appreciate new
experience, to find in the world objects of value.
Value varies with idea-resource.1

These considerations all but compel the simple hy-
pothesis which I have here to offer. It is that all valuing
(and so all feeling) is a way of knowing objects with
one's whole-idea. In some way, in valuing, appreciat-
ing, enjoying, we are using this idea-mass ; yet not in
the effortful way of deliberate thinking : an object of
value is an object in which my whole-idea finds some
peculiar ease and sufficiency of application. The worth
which any object or end can have for me depends on
mutual fitness between my idea-mass and that object —
the fitness of my idea to comprehend the object; the
fitness of the object to engage the idea.2 Let me state
this theory more fully, and then illustrate it at length.

Let us summon up such true conception of idea as we

1 To put the matter roughly : to he more alive is both to see more
and to feel more — and these are not two separate things, hat at bottom
one.

2 In a former chapter (chapter vi) we suggested that feeling might he
explained as a transition from one state of knowledge to another. Now
we have to complete this view by explaining the original instability in
our knowledge-field at any time. This instability, I think, is due in part
to the varying capacity of objects for the total idea-mass, and partly to
the varying potential of this idea-mass itself, due to work done upon it.
See for more detail than this chapter can give the explanatory essay on
Idea and Value in Biological Context.

130 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND KELIGIOUS THEORY

can now muster; idea, as the living and infinite thing
with which we meet and know our experience. Note
what can be easily noted : that any successful working
of the idea in knowing its object is a pleasure — espe-
cially the finding of an idea, and the use of a new-found
idea (as a child repeats the new-learned word with
recurrent satisfaction). Note that of all ideas, the idea
of reality is most of all thought with ; as all ideas seek
their meaning-terminus in reality, so all idea-use is at
the same time use of the idea of reality. With our
reality-idea we think, not only reality itself, but also, so
far as we are able, every particular object of experience.
Spontaneously, not deliberately, we endeavor to see in
each object of attention a case, more or less complete, of
what reality means to us. Now suppose that the value
of any object of attention is nothing other than the
entering of that reality-idea into the thought of the
object. Suppose that the degree and sign (positive or
negative) of that value is a measure of the success or
unsuccess of this idea-use ; the fulness with which that
object-vessel can contain that wealth of background
meaning, always pressing to know — not to be known.
Would it not at once become clear that our reality-
idea, our whole-idea, must determine the level1 at which
all our values will stand, must be, in a definite sense,
the reservoir of all value for us?

All idea at work upon its object is a source of feel-
ing. As for the idea not at work upon its object — let
us here once for all note that there is no such thing.
The unused idea, lying latent and un-feeling in the

1 Strictly speaking, must constitute one determinant of that level.
What the objective determinants may be, we need not here consider.

IDEA IN OKGANIC UNION WITH FEELING 131

mind, is the most obstructive, yet emptiest of all psy-
chological superstitions. The life of the idea is in its
use, not as being thought of (one must repeat) but as
thinking; and not alone in thinking its own-named
object; but also in thinking every other object upon
which it may even remotely bear — in the end, every
other object ; in the process of thinking any object before
consciousness no idea can be wholly inactive. With
what idea, pray, do I think hat ? With the hat-idea, to
be sure. Yes, but is the clothing-idea unconcerned? —
or the city-streefr-idea ? or the civilized-society-extraor-
dinary-requirements-ideas? or the man -and- woman -
ideas? or the whole mass of aesthetic notions, and
political, historical, even religious opinions ? With, all
these, and with all other ideas summing themselves up
currently in my whole-idea, hat is thought. If hat has
a practical meaning as something to-be-put-on, or to-be-
taken-off, or to be otherwise dealt with, it is because
hat through these other ideas has already acquired a
more intimate significance and value than these extrane-
ous action-hints can suggest. A value measured by the
degree, proportion, and facility with which my whole
idea-equipment can find itself in hat. Probably this
direct feeling-value of hat is not large ; probably a prim-
rose, a bit of music, a single human being, would involve
my idea-world more adequately and immediately : if so,
the feeling-value of these objects is higher. But in one
case as in the other, whatever may occupy attention,
occupies the man; it is he as a total self, mind-total,
who for the moment gives himself to that object, dis-
covering in it what value it may have for him.

The meaning of these proposals may best be seen

132 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

where value varies visibly with idea* As where ghost-
terror is created by idea-anticipation; or where with
the growth of knowledge an interest seems to develop
out of no-interest, value created from nothing by the
rise of idea and idea-application.1 To become a connois-
seur, an amateur, in any field is a self-furthering process
after the first few conceptions have been won, the first
elements of a collection made, and the idea, now fairly
alive, becomes hungry for its own food. Acquiring
some bit of skill, and delighting in the use of it, is a
value creation of the same type, though the units here
are idea-action couples, not ideas alone ; the delight is in
the meeting of situations, the union of confidence with
challenge and novelty, the instantaneous judgment that
my idea is meeting the various phases of the new case
as they arise, even while my hand is carrying out the
part assigned by the idea. What one does well, one
likes ; what one does not like, dancing, speaking French,
public ceremony, is in all likelihood something one does
less than well, feeling therein an inadequacy, shall we
not say of "habit," modestly suggesting "lack of prac-
tice" ? — shall we not rather say (tracing our feeling to
its lair) primarily an infacility of idea, a felt inferiority
not of the animal but of the spirit. In all such matters

1 The whole history of value we cannot here follow. In the more
momentary spot-values of pleasure and pain, or of direct satisfaction of
instinct, the work of idea is not quickly seen. Such values seem fixed by
Kature in the physical frame ; a certain value-capital, one might think,
sufficiently free from idea. Yet not meaning-less; rather, spots of instan-
taneous meaning, whose idea-elements are separated with difficulty,
becoming slowly interpretable as the idea-world thickens about them, as
poetry in time, then philosophy begin to voice the meaning of sex-love.
In greater detail this theory of value is presented in the final essay on
« Idea and Value."

IDEA IN ORGANIC UNION WITH FEELING 133

rapid subsumption is the inner kernel of delight. The
pleasure found in a generalization, even in mildly lifting
the conception of ordinary things into a wider sphere
of relation (flowers as modified leaves, or neuron-idea
embracing all nerve-forms) ; the discovery of genial re-
semblances wherein so much of the pleasure of litera-
ture consists; that noting of more hidden likenesses
which has been said to mark genius — all this value-
making is but the idea-making process in its own natural
freedom.

Note also how values change as life matures. The
ends which men pursue are less tangible than those
spot-splashes of pleasure-color hypnotic to the eye of
childhood, though not excluding them. Family, and
status, and power, and the doing of human work, and
whatever else, are ends whose appeal can be seen to
vary visibly from man to man, not so much with instinct
as with experience, and not so much with experience
alone as with digested experience, Weltanschauung,
whole-idea. The significance of any given event will
be estimated variously, a given circumstance will give
pleasure or pain, chiefly according to the ' way of think-
ing,9 the ' point of view' of the subject. The critical
question put to me by any happening is, "Can my con-
ception of reality accept and place that happening, or
can it not ? " That alone will please me in the end
which is according to Nature as I conceive Nature;
that alone can hold me prisoner wherein Nature itself,
or reality, or Deity, becomes visible or vocal. Experi-
ence is a course of perpetual conflict between my Idea
and my circumstance, each modifying the other until my
idea of reality can cope with circumstance and all its

134 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

issues. No man can be content to accept evil as finality :
each must have his theory of evil, as a means of bring*
ing that evil under the conception of the whole, and so
— of disposing of it. To win such idea, and to use it
effectively, constitutes certainly not the whole, but a
large part of the achievable satisfaction of any mature
human life.

Consciousness is essentially cumulative; experience
becomes memory, becomes idea, whereby as Bergson
justly insists, no new event can have the same meaning
with any previous event — for none can be received
into the same soul. All such cumulation, however, builds
itself into the fabric of the permanent whole-idea, there-
by contributing, in any person, to a quality of character,
a general value-tone, or flavor, which becomes relatively
stable. That which we first sense in any person is the
operation of this whole-idea ; that which we value is
some excellence in its operation. Burke elevates what-
ever subject he touches; his place is secure among the
minds of earth because the vigor of that whole-presence
casts a nobility over all valuation, makes human exist-
ence another and better thing than at our common ease
it inclines to be. To see the significance of things triv-
ial is the prerogative of greatness, to see everything as
bearing upon the whole is both genius and happiness,
bo see all things sub specie ceternitatis is the joy of
religion itself. To conceive a thing largely, to throw
over it a generous dome — this is the very physiology of
human worth. It is not necessarily the express logical
reflection upon things that endows a life richly with
this human quality. It is not even the clear-held mem-
ory of special circumstances* It is rather the spontane*

IDEA IN ORGANIC UNION WITH FEELING 135

ous after-working of experience once well-met — which
is Idea, holding idea and event together until they
answer " Done " : this experience-well-met it is, which
entering into the bone and blood of the Idea (for the
most part unreachable in speech) builds human quality
and human worth.

Love itself, then, if we are right, is not a thing apart
from knowledge. That which we love is not indeed
learning, or logic-skill, but some reality-thought at
work upon an actual experience, creating there the very
material of beauty and value. No one will be loved
blindly ; no one will be loved as other than an intel-
ligence, human and universal, sharing in that same
reality which all men share. Love and sympathy we often
think of as feeling, in direct contrast to idea. It is clear
however that they both are cognizances of another, do
in some way make the leap between my own soul and
the soul of some one not-myself, intend to put me in
veritable rapport with what thought is passing there,
the very tour deforce of objectivity. "We note further
that that sympathy which is not exact knowledge of
the other, is of feeble and ineffective quality; that we
incline to measure the worth of sympathy by the extent
of its gratuitous and extraordinary perception of the
other's situation. Sympathy notes what the casual eye
ignores : for sympathy is objectivity of mind, and objec-
tivity of mind is knowing. Interest in objectivity, which
we have found at the root of all idea-making, is love
itself directed to reality; and conversely, the interest in
reality is the measure of all possible love and apprecia-
tion, toward humanity, or in the Arts.

Love and sympathy are the activity of the idea. And

136 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

in their exercise, the idea is enlarged. The lover widen
his experience as the non-lover cannot. He adds to th»
mass of his idea-world, and acquires thereby enhanced
power to appreciate all things. Is not this the suffi-
cient solution of that long-standing difficulty between
* egoism and altruism ? ' The altruist alone can accu-
mulate that treasure of idea through which all things
must be enjoyed that are enjoyed. No one has, or can
have, any ' egoistic' satisfaction except as a conse-
quence of so much effective love of reality as there is
in him by birth or acquisition.

If what is here said does truly represent the organic
bond between idea and feeling, we may now confirm —
but with better understanding — the extraordinary inti-
macy between the ideas of religion and human feeling at
large. It is not alone the specifically religious feeling
with which the religious idea is bound up : it is — as an
interpretation of our whole-idea — a factor in all human
feeling and value. And that, immediately — not by way
of any external arrangements in which the work of God
may meet and supplement the work of men : not exclud-
ing these — not waiting for them. The use of the God-
idea (which if one have cannot but be the most-used of
all ideas — not as thought-of but as thinking), the use
of this idea will be the chief determinant of the value-
level in any consciousness. Whether or not the termi-
nal-object of one's faith be called God, whatever object
comes before the mind of any man must inevitably be
judged at last by that man's sense of the nature of the
reality with which he has, in the end, to do ; and thereby
must the current-worth of his experience be continuously

IDEA IN ORGANIC UNION WITH FEELING 137

determined. And very probably the religious feelings
themselves, religious f ear, religious hope, religious wor-
ship, are in part instinctive recognitions of the imme-
diate vital bearing of such idea-possession upon every
conceivable human value : not only as conserving those
values (from internal decay) but also as presiding over
their perpetual increase. The meaning of the religious
idea is so far inseparable from this fateful value-bearing
as almost to justify the statement that religion is the
region where fact and value coincide : where there is
no idea apart from feeling, as there is no feeling apart
from idea.

We have then no cause to fear that labor and inter-
est spent on religious truth will be lost from the side of
feeling. It is only by a recovery of " theoretical " con-
viction that religion can either maintain its own vitality
or contribute anything specific to human happiness. In
the attainment of knowledge, feeling — in so far as it
is connected with agitation and active-impulse — is silent :
but the end of feeling is at the same time the beginning
of a new world of value, wherein all feelings are reborn
through renewal of their source. Through losing its
life, and only thus, can feeling save its life.1

1 This is true whether religious knowledge is won in the course of
metaphysical reflection, or as the mystics have often won their insight
through a process which looks very different, through worship. In worship
also, feeling as a spur to particular action comes momentarily to rest.
Schleiermacher's interpretation of religious experience in terms of depend-
ence, awe, reverence — relatively quiescent and contemplative feelings
we called them — is not far from the truth; hut ahove these feelings and
including them stands the impulse of worship, in which all these other
feelings unite and finally vanish into a present sense of reality and worth.
Worship conducts religions feeling to its terminus hi cognizance: and thus
worship stands at the node of a rhythm or alternation through which the

138 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND BELIGIOUS THEORY

We may now perceive, in bare outline, the more lit-
eral sense of our former figure which represented reli-
gion as a parent rather than an agent in history. For the
religious idea bears upon the Arts, not so much through
particular instigations of thought and action as through
a more internal f ruitf ulness, watering and sustaining all
those perceptions of value, in which the work of the
Arts must terminate. It is through devotion to the Idea,
to the reality of the world — a devotion which, what-
ever else it may be, is also a theoretical devotion — that
religious feeling and all human feeling must be kept alive.

values of our lives pass — disappearing and reappearing. The principle of
this alternation is further developed in Part V.

CHAPTER XH

THE WILL AS A MAKER OF TRUTH

w

HATEVER value religion has for man -will be
funded, we now judge, in the religious ideas,
especially in the religious world-idea or reality-idea or
substance-idea — the idea of God. Judging religion
solely by its effectiveness in human affairs we will have
no religion without metaphysics, which is but a knowl-
edge of reality. Religion does its work by way of its
truth. Creed and theology become again important to
us ; become the essential treasures of religion : for in
them the race preserves from age to age the determin-
ing factors of all human worth.

Such is, in fact, my own belief. But there is one for-
midable question to be met before we can either rest in
this conclusion, or wholly understand its meaning. We
have been assuming that reality is a finished total which
it is our place to recognize and adjust ourselves to, with-
out presuming to alter its general aspect. We have been
assuming that if there is a God at all, God is a fixity in
the universe ; a being whom we must accept and not un-
dertake to change. We have been assuming that the ob-
jects of our religious interestare all made up in advance,
and that our own wills have no part to play in deter-
mining what is ; in short that as knowers of reality we
must be passive, receptive toward the truth as it is, tak-
ing it as we find it, in experience and in idea. But
this general assumption of ours, that reality such as

140 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

religion deals with is what it is in independence of our
own wills, not to be created or destroyed by anything
we may resolve or do about it, — this general assump-
tion is open to doubt.

There are certainly some regions of reality which are
unfinished. We are endowed with wills only because
there are such regions, to which it is our whole occupa-
tion to give shape and character. In such regions the
will-to-believe is justified, because it is no will-to-make-
believe, but a veritable will to create the truth in which
we believe. What I believe of my fellow men goes far
to determine what my fellow men actually are. Believe
men liars — they show themselves such; determine your-
self upon their essential goodness, and they do not disap-
point your resolve : your belief is not one which can ever
be refuted, for the characters of men are not finished
parts of reality ; they are still being built, and your will
is a factor in the building. Where truth is thus waiting
to be finished or determined, the will may hold the
deciding play.

Every social need, such as the need for friendship,
must be a party to its own satisfaction : I cannot pas-
sively find my friend as a ready-made friend ; a ready-
made human being he may be, but his friendship for
me I must help to create by my own active resolve.
So of the great political reality, the State. This also is
nothing which man has found ready-made. The State
is a reality which is what it is by dint of the combined
resolves of many human wills, through time : we individ-
uals find the State as something apparently finished,
standing there as something to be empirically accepted ;
but at no time does the existence of this object become

THE WILL AS A MAKER OF TRUTH 141

so independent that it can continue to hold its reality
apart from the good -will which from moment to mo-
ment recreates it. May it be that the objects in which
religion is concerned are in some ways like these, belong-
ing to the unfinished regions of reality?

We find our religion much as we find our State, an
inherited possession fixed in its main outlines by no
will of our own; yet an expression, perhaps, of the
racial good-will of men, depending like the State on the
continued good-will of all individuals for its validity,
even for its truth. Eeligion throws over human life
a unity like that of the State, but vaster : it provides
a canopy under which all men may recognize their
brotherhood : in the good-will of religion a totality of
spirit is brought about which apart from that good-
will has no independent existence. In holding to this
qualification of my whole-idea — by the idea of a
spiritual totality which I must cooperate with othei
men to make real — I find an immeasurable and sub-
stantial enlargement of my field of vision and so of
my whole level of values. Is not this spiritual unity,
though a function of the will of man, a large part of
what I mean by the name God ? Through religion, too,
a still greater totality is accomplished : a world beyond
is brought into conjunction with our present interest,
and our mortal lives are endowed with prospects of
immortality. Yet I strongly doubt whether immortality
is any such predetermined reality that it exists for any
person apart from that person's will to make it real. The
future life may well be such an object as my decision
can make real or unreal, so far as my own experience is

142 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

concerned. And in general, when we consider closely
the kind of object which religion presents for our faith
we find it such as might well be plastic to the determi-
nations of the will, more plastic even than friendship or
the State. For these objects are not to be found on
earth like the friend ; nor are they to be set up in visi-
ble form like the State : they exist wholly in that region
of the spirit, whose coming and going is immediately
sensitive to every variation of loyalty and disloyalty on
the part of the souls in which alone it has its life.

Further, the difference between a religious view of
the world and a non-religious view lies chiefly in the
quality or character which is attributed to the world
as a whole. It does not lie in the circumstance that the
religious mind has a whole-idea, while the non-religious
mind has none : every man must have his whole-idea, and
such as it is, it will determine what value existence may
have for him. But the critical difference appears in the
judgments about the whole ; whether this reality of ours
is divine, or infernal, or an indifferent universal grave-
pit. These differences, we may say, are differences in
predicates, rather than in the subject j. and it is precisely
in the matter of the predicates which can be applied to
the world as a whole that we found the primary diffi-
culty of religious knowledge to lie.1 Every one begins
with his whole-idea ; but it is the function of religion to
interpret this whole as divine; in brief, to make the
transition from the whole-idea to the idea of God. These
other words of ours, non-committal in regard to quality
— « the whole," "substance," "reality"— do they
fairly name that with which religion has to do ? Is not
*Fp. 100 ft above.

THE WILL AS A MAKER OF TRUTH 143

the problem of religious knowledge a problem of the
attributes of reality;1 and are not these attributes
indeterminate, apart from the will ?

For it is not simply the case that these attributes
which religion ascribes to reality (divinity, beneficence,
soul-preserving or value-conserving properties) are
invisible, spiritual, inaccessible to observation: it is the
case that these ideas, so far as reasons go, are in apparent
equilibrium — neither provable nor disprovable. The
world would be consistent without God; it would also
be consistent with God : whichever hypothesis a man
adopts will fit experience equally well ; neither one, so
far as accounting for visible facts is concerned, works
better than the other. I have often wondered whether
in these supermundane matters the universe may not be
so nicely adjusted (and withal so justly) that each man
finds true the things he believes in and wills for ; why
should not every man find his religion true, in so far
as he has indeed set his heart upon it and made sacri-
fices for it ? However this may be, the religious objects
(the predicates given by religion to reality) stand at a
pass of intellectual equipoise: it may well seem that
some other faculty must enter in to give determination
to reason at the point where reason halts, without decid-
ing voice of its own. The birth of the idea of God in
the mind — the judgment " Eeality is living, divine, a
God exists" — is so subtle, like the faintest breath of
the spirit upon the face of the waters, that no look

1 The earliest ideas and names for the Deity seem to have been rather
adjectives than nouns. Among the Aryans, the divine was expressed as
"the shining," "the illustrious" ; among Malays and Indians and very
generally elsewhere, * the wonderful," " the powerful," " the immense.**

144 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS XJ

within can tell whether God is here revealing himself to
man, or man creating God.

It is because of this position of subtle equilibrium
that the religious consciousness is evanescent ; faith is
unstable as empirical knowledge is not. Though at any
time I find my world sacred, it only needs a touch of
passivity on my part and it will again become secular :
I cannot recover nor understand its former worth. My
faith in God is subject to fluctuation as my faith in
other objects is not, even though these other objects are
equally inaccessible (as my faith in China or in the con-
servation of energy). And noteworthy about this fluc-
tuation is that it passes from extreme to extreme, not
pausing in the intermediate stages of probability : the
existence of God is to me either wholly certain or wholly
absurd. Likewise of immortality: it seems to me at
times that a man is a fool to believe it, at other times
that a man is a fool not to believe it. I have no power
of weighing shades of probability in these matters. It
must be so, it can't be so : these are the only degrees of
which my own religious faith is capable. But alterna-
tives like these belong rather to the will or disposition
of the spirit than to the estimating mind. And further,
the one thing which is most sure to dispel faith and
substitute the secular world-picture is precisely intellec-
tual scrutiny. Faith is not only difficult for reason ; it is
distinctly diffident toward reason. Its origin, then, and
its firmness must be due to some other power, presum-
ably to will.

It would help our thought on this point if we could
trace the mental processes in which the idea of God first

THE WILL AS A MAKER OP TRUTH 145

arises in human consciousness. It is more than doubt-
ful whether any such tracing is possible; and largely
because of the circumstances which we have pointed out :
the thought of God comes and goes ; is often lost and often
recovered, both in racial and in individual experience ; it
appears also in various ways to various minds. No
historical nor typical origin of the belief in God can be
shown. Nevertheless, taking as a beginning a mood of
secularity which often recurs in human experience, there
may be some measure of typical psychological truth in
such a picture as this which follows :

There is a grim and menacing aspect of reality which
remains commonly unemphatic as our lives go but which
events may at any time uncover. We are obliged to
witness this vast Whole, of which we speak so easily,
threatening existence or destroying the things that make
our existence valuable. Against such threats our usual
methods of protection avail exactly nothing. The mer-
ciless processes of nature, of disease and death, of fate
generally, are not impressed by entreaty or by effort,
are not to be beaten off with clubs nor frightened away
by shrieks and gestures of defiance. All these weapons
will be tried; and trial best convinces of futility. Fear
and hope normally inspire action ; fear and hope show
themselves alike empty in this situation . That with which
one has to do is reality itself ; and toward this only some
less external attitude can be significant. But in the
human creature at bay there are other depths ; the recog-
nition of futility is the beginning of human adequacy.
For despair ends by calling out a certain touch of resent-
ment, — resentment having a tinge of self-assertion in
it, even of moral requirement directed against reality.

146 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

Such a being as I, by virtue of this very power of real-
izing my situation, by virtue of my whole-idea and
my self-consciousness, has some claim to urge upon the
reality that surrounds me, threatening; the reality which,
after all, has brought me forth. Though by the slight-
est movement of this deep-lying sense of right, one does,
in effect, demand justice of his creator : and thereby, with-
out premeditation, finds himself with the idea of Deity
already constituted and possessed. For toward what can
moral resentment and demand be addressed but to a liv-
ing and moral Being ? In that deep impulse of self-
assertion there was involved, though I knew it not, the
will that my reality should be a living and responsible
reality. And in time I shall find that in imputing this
quality to my world, I have already lifted the burden of
those anxieties, so helpless upon their own plane. The
God-idea thus appears as a postulate of our moral con-
sciousness : an original object of resolve which tends to
make itself good in experience.

For the proof of this new-found or new-made relation
to reality, expressed in my God-idea, is this : that in meet-
ing my world divinely it shows itself divine. It supports
my postulate. And without such act of will, no discov-
ery of divinity could take place. Men cannot be worthy
of reverence, until I meet them with reverence : for my
reverence is the dome under which alone their possible
greatness can stand and live. Of the world likewise, —
it can have no divinity but only materiality or menac-
ing insensibility, unless I throw over it the category
under whose dome its holiness can rise visible and
actual. God cannot live, as divine and beneficent, ex-
cept in the opportunity created by our good-will : but

THE WILL AS A MAKER OF TRUTH 147

given the good-will, reality is such as will become
indeed divine.

In accord with this conjecture as to the position of
religious truth, namely that it is determined by the
movement of will-to-believe, is an old observation of reli-
gious experience. It is written that he who seeks finds:
the connection between seeking and finding is infallible.
Such infallible connection may be many-wise under-
stood, but it may be thus understood, that the seeking
brings the finding with it. " Thou wouldst not seek me
hadst thou not already found me," said Pascal: and to
Sabatier this thought came " like a flash of light . . .
the solution of a problem that had long appeared insol-
uble." l The religiousness of man's nature is the whole
substance of his revelation. Whatever we impute to
the world comes back to us as a quality pre-resident
there — is not this the whole illusion of reality ?
Impute then to the world a living beneficence : the world
will not reject this imputation, will be even as you have
willed it.2 Your belief becomes (as Pichte held) an
evidence of your character — not of your learning. He
who waits his assent till God is proved to him, will
never find Him. But he who seeks finds — has already
found.

In all these respects there is the strongest resemblance
between the religious idea and human value. The world

1 Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, p. 32.

2 The Chinese have long had a saying " If you believe in the gods, the
gods exist : if you do not believe in them they do not exist." Whence prag-
matism as a theory of metaphysics may be said to be of Chinese origin.
See A. H. Smith, Chinese Characteristics, p. 301.

148 RELIGIOUS FEELING- AND EELIGIOUS THEORY

is consistent without Deity (so it is said) ; the world is
consistent also without beauty, or other charm. Before
reason, religious assurance is evanescent : so also with
any pleasure or other worth when by introspection, or
analysis, we determine to seize its secret. The world-
body to the eye of Fact is grey, even dead with all its
working ; if it is to be reanimated with worth, it must
be by that miracle which continually repeats itself in
our experience — the Spirit breathes upon it from its
own resources the breath of life. Thus the birth of
value and the birth of God-faith are alike ; as indeed
we have every reason to believe, if the conclusions of
the last chapter are valid: is it not possible that they
are the same thing, — in both cases the work of an
ultimate good-will toward our world? If the union
which we have proposed between idea and feeling
is indeed so intimate and equal that "without feel-
ing the ideas are false ; even as without the idea the
feelings are meaningless," it is at least possible that
some deeper faculty fundamental to both idea and
feeling is here giving laws to reality itself: deciding
what the truth, and therewith the value, of my world
shall be.

A new conception of faith appears here : faith is more
than passive feeling, more also than the sight which
seizes upon the reality of the world as it is — faith is
the loyal determination and resolve which sees the world
as it is capable of becoming, and commits its fortunes to
the effort to make real what it thus sees. The religious
creed or world-view becomes a postulate rather than
either an empirical discovery or a revelation to be
obediently received.

THE WILL AS A MAKER OF TRUTH 149

I know not whether this presentation of a voluntaristic
foundation for religious truth has been able to provoke
any acceptance on the part of the reader : it is a para-
doxical doctrine, yet it has in it great power, and
especially great relief for the difficult situation of the
religious idea. To my mind, I must admit, nothing
more illuminating has ever been put forward than
just such interpretation of many a religious doctrine ;
nothing truer to the way in which religious picturing
and myth-building does actually take place in the
human consciousness.

Taking religious ideas literally and fixedly is, in fact,
a modern and Western peculiarity. The Oriental mind
realizes that the spiritual atmosphere in which either
men or gods may breathe, must be created ; it knows
nothing of empirical truth in matters of religion, truth
passively taken ; and postulate joins hands with poetry
in constituting the medium in which all spirituality may
live. (The freedom of the religious poem or myth or
parable may be regarded as the will-to-believe at play.)
The Oriental mind speaks understandingly of miracles
and virgin births, because it sees in them poetic means
of lifting what it will pronounce divine above the com-
monplace of profane event and indolent human charac-
ter. We also, of the West, have our own style of poetry
and imagination ; of which we see well enough that it
must be understood with imagination and humor also
after its kind. But we approach, in religious matters,
the poetry of the Orient often with a literal-minded
savagery, which must accuse us of some deeper defect
than simple lack of humor — a lack, namely, of spir-
ituality itself, which knows that the language of the

150 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

spirit must be read by the spirit also, and is not to be
rudely transferred into empirical text-books of physics
and of medicine. I do not doubt that in religion as in
human experience generally, each will sets the level of
its own life, determines in large measure its own destiny,
and helps to create spiritual reality for all other human
life, A faith without a large ingredient of will, is no
faith at all.

Nevertheless, I must believe that the great heave of
the West to get a literal and objective grip upon its
major religious objects is an advance, and not a retro-
gression. We only drive men to make their religion all
prose, when we threaten to make it all poetry and postu-
late. Tor poetry and postulate are pioneer stages of
truth, and live by the ounce of literality and truth*
independent that is at their heart. The large scope for
our own will and creation is not denied : the world is
such as to make this creativity possible. But then our
religion attaches itself to the literal truth that the
world is such, already such, as to alloio these develop-
ments and to respond thus sensitively to our acts of
will. This prior element becomes our religious creed ;
the region of our wills to create becomes the province
of art and of morals.

The destiny of religious truth to become universal
and imperative must detach it at last from all salient
subjectivity; must state and define the scope of our
creative possibilities within the frame of that which
independently Is. Literality is an accomplishment of
deepening self-consciousness ; it marks an achievement
of personal equilibrium and stability, which is able to
recognize corresponding stability and identity in the

THE WILL AS A MAKER OF TRUTH 151

world with which it deals, — not as limiting its own
freedom, but as upholding it. It has required a Western
integrity and self-respect to submit in obedience to the
observation of Nature ; it is this same integrity which
requires in its religious objects that to which it must
be obedient, as the basis of whatever creativity and
command it will claim.

Early religious objects are like play-objects of chil-
dren, whose character is partly real, and partly conferred
by the player. This, says the child, shall be a soldier, —
this a good soldier, and this a bad one — and behold
they are such. To hold interest, playthings must become
more autonomous as the child grows, more locomotive,
more realistic and difficult to manage. In time they are
,all to be displaced by objects of the same name, — but
real. As for these real objects, they are more danger-
ous, more refractory ; they have independent inner pur-
poses of their own ; our success in dealing with them is
uncertain, whereas with the play-objects, whose inner
thoughts were such only as we imputed to them, our
success was a forgone conclusion. Play is the necessary
prologue to life, because, chiefly, it is necessary to meet
life with the habit of success. Not wholly different may
it have been with the maturation of the religious life in
human history. Let the religious instinct have its full
swing and success in its traffic with divinities and world-
auspices which are in large part the work of its own
will, if not of its own hand. Thereby may it be prepared
to meet with the temper of success the ear of a Deity
wholly himself, wholly identical in his own counsel.
Christianity marks the first great inburst of the Orient
into consciousness of the literal world, with its literal

152 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

human problem and world sorrow, the first worship of
the literal God of that world. The work of literalizing
our creed is never to be finished ; for imagination and
postulate move more rapidly than the leaven of objec-
tivity can spread ; but they move under the protection
of the major literalities. Upon these major literalities
religion must henceforth and forever be built. For ma-
turity is marked by the preference to be defeated rather
than have a subjective success. We as mature persons
can worship only that which we are compelled to wor-
ship. If we are offered a man-made God and a self-
answering prayer, we will rather have no God and no
prayer. There can be no valid worship except that in
which man is involuntarily bent by the presence of the
Most Real, beyond his will.

The problem of loyalty in religion is not different
from the problem of loyalty elsewhere. It is true that
we cannot be loyal to any tie that has been imposed
upon us without our own consent — this is the first prem-
ise alike of love and of government. On the other
hand, we cannot be loyal to any tie that has been fabri-
cated by a needless stroke of our own will. Any object
which can hold our allegiance must therefore be at the
same time an object of free choice, and an object of
necessary choice. In the expressions of romantic love
it is hard to tell which is uppermost : that this bond
between the lovers is wholly their own, their exclusive
knowledge and will, the highest work of their own free-
dom ; or that this bond is the work of Fate, such as the
stars of heaven from all time have destined to effect.
Unless God is that being for whom the soul is likewise
inescapably destined by the eternal nature of things,

THE WILL AS A MAKER OF TRUTH 153

the worship of God will get no sufficient hold on the
human heart. Religion is indeed a manifestation of the
generous and creative side of human nature; but its
generosity is not that of creation out of whole cloth, —
it is the generosity of the spirit ready to acknowledge
the full otherness of its objects, and to live divinely in
a world which is divine.

It is still possible that reality in its whole constitution
is a matter of choice, though not of our choice. The
results of your choice become data to me; your will is
my fact: it may be similarly that everything which is
fact to our human consciousness is the creative choice
of a supreme Will. On such a supposition, voluntaristic
views of reality would be true for God, but for no other.
It is true that creativity is the essential quality of the
will; and in the constitution of reality, man's will is to
cooperate with whatever other creative will there may
be in the universe. But man has religion because he is
not wholly identical with God; and his religion will be
founded upon that relation to reality in which he is less
creative than dependent, — or more exactly, in which
his creatorship is a result of his dependence.1

For in truth, our human life is only an apprenticeship
in creativity. The small launches of postulation which
we make depend on being quickly caught up and floated
by a tide of corroboration hailing from beyond ourselves.

1 There are two uses of the word independent which need to be dis-
tinguished. One kind of independence is mutual, a symmetrical relation:
A is independent of B, B is independent of A. The other kind is not
symmetrical: A is independent of B, B is dependent upon A. It is in this
latter sense that we refer to 'the independent variable/ in mathematical
and physical systems. Reality has an element of the latter kind of inde-
pendence of finite purposes, not of the former.

154 BELHHOUS FEELING AND KELIGIOUS THEORY

We leap ; but unless we are soon borne up from beyond
we make but a sorry flight. And however far my crea-
tivity extends, my own creations never become truth for
me, until seen through the eye of another than myself
they are recognized by him as fact, and so made valid
for me also. My best creativity must win the consent
of the independent before it can take the status of truth,
even in my own eyes. The word truth has in it some
reference not to be suppressed to a wholly other than
myself, to a will wholly other than mine, as a condition
of the reality of anything created. Thus, all finite crea-
tivity contemplates this other, which by implication is
not a product of its will ; it is this radically independent
reality which religion seeks to know, and which alone it
can worship.

How, then, is religious truth to be known ? Are the
realities of which religion speaks to be discovered in
experience? Or are they matters of hypothesis, or of
inference, that is to say, of reason? Our answer has been
implied in what has gone before: religious truth is
founded upon experience. In that imaginary picture of
ours of the psychological birth of the idea of God —
in which it seemed to us as if our resentment, a stroke
of moral will, had spontaneously made or recognized
our world a living and responsible being — we may dis-
cern beside the stroke of will an experience of discovery.1
If there is any knowledge of God, it must be in some

1 Of some such subtle but veritable experience I believe tbat all
"revelation" is built. Revelation is knowledge real and empirical (i.e.,
received in relative passivity), which is more certain in itself than in its
assignable connections with the main body of experience. The logic of
the matter is worked out in Parts IV and VI.

THE WILL AS A MAKER OF TRUTH 155

such way a matter of experience. This implies that our
experience of reality is not confined to sensation. Sen-
sation itself also brings us into contact with a reality
which is independent of our will ; sensation is a meta-
physical experience. And religious faith must be built
upon an experience not wholly different from sensation ;
but a super-sensible experience, like our experience of
our human fellows ; an experience which recognizes the
reality given in sensation for what, in its true nature,
it is*

And whatever is matter of experience must also
become, in time, matter of reason ; for reason is but the
process of finding, by some secure path of connection,
a given experience from the standpoint of other expe-
rience assumed as better known. The proof of God's
existence is (as Hegel put it) but the lifting of the mind
to God from out of the affairs of secular business. Such
proof, or mental direction, is called for, not because
the religious objects are inaccessible to experience, but
rather because they are accessible ; and being found in
experience, it is necessary to establish their systematic
relations with the rest. It is through reason that the
original and evanescent experience of God becomes
established as veritable truth.

This, then, is the result to which our labors so far
have led. We cannot find a footing for religion in feel-
ing: we must look for valid religious ideas. And these
ideas are not to be taken at liberty, nor deduced from
the conception of any necessary purpose : we are to seek
the truth of religion obediently in experience as some-
thing which is established in independence of our finite
wills. So far we have done no more than orient our

156 EELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

search. The task itself we shall take up in a later part
of this hook.

In the meantime, while voluntarism cannot define truth
for us, religious truth least of all, it remains the most im-
portant and valuable of all tests of truth and ballasts of
judgment about truth. The question, " What kind of
world would best satisfy the requirements of our wills ?"
can never finally determine what kind of world we, in
reality, have. But such questions may go far toward
clearing our mind about those requirements themselves ;
they may give some not-unimportant hints of what we
have to expect of reality. To this pragmatic type of
inference we shall devote the next few studies.

NOTE ON PKAGMATIC IDEALISM

Ethe foregoing chapter we have appealed from that which
re can voluntarily determine to that which independently
Is, as the necessary basis of religious truth. And this appeal
is on the whole valid and intelligible. But voluntarism may
recur to its most searching and general question — a question
which we have already dealt with by implication1 but which
may now with advantage be considered by itself. It may
require of us an account of that independence which we expect
to discover, doubting whether anything in this universe can
be essentially independent of any other, doubting whether any
real object of ours is independent of ourselves, doubting
whether in the last resort those most real objects of our best
maturity are not also there, in all their inner freedom and
autonomy, by dint of some deeper will of ours, some necessary
or absolute will. Have we not even now said that we must
desire that our religious objects have such independence, that
we need it as a support for our loyalty ? and in confessing
these needs have we not admitted that this independence may
still be regarded as the free deed of our own deepest will,
and so no absolute independence ?

It is in experience that we meet with the supposedly inde-
pendent realities of nature and society with that total volume
of Fact which is there whether we will or not. But experience
has long been known to be no such passive affair as it seems.
Idealism has made clear to us how much the mind must con-
tribute to make its experience what it is : how little is actually
given, how much is made on the basis of this little — or noth-
ing— from outside* We think we find our fellow men, for
example, as independent metaphysical entities ; we treat them

1 Both in the above chapter and in chapter x, in discussing the
meaning of ideas.

158 BELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

as if they were such. But even as we observed how far the
qualities and characters of men are determined by our own
resolve, so we may now see, striking deeper, that their very
metaphysical selfhood, their individuality, is real by consent
rather than by given fact. Neither they nor we find given
any substantial soul or individual in this world, whether theirs
or our own ; but our purpose is to live in a world of real
persons, and so far as possible to be real persons ourselves.
According to this necessary aspiration we act, and cannot help
acting. But in its nature our whole environment of " meta-
physical reality " is no independent fact, passively received,
but a determination of our own absolute will.

Such, in brief, are the considerations pressed upon us by
volitional idealism, especially in the form in which that ideal-
ism is presented by Fichte, and in our own time by Royce,
by Miinsterberg, by Rickert, and others. l There is nothing
true for any subject in which it is not possible to trace the sign
of the subject and of the deepest will of the subject. Reality
itself can have no other independence of the thinker than that
which he wills it to have.

But valuable and morally important as all this is, to know
how much of what we passingly regard as independent Fact
is in the making of our own wills, the case of the (pragmatic)
idealist is not — I must think — complete ; nor can it be com-
pleted. There may be no assignable feature of my world in
which I cannot trace the work of my own will : it still remains
possible that there may be no assignable feature of my world
in which I cannot trace also the work of something not-my-
will. Let me illustrate this situation :

Independence may be symbolized by discontinuity in geom-
etry, — let us say, by a point that stands off by itself. There
1 For our present argument the differences between these thinkers,
important as they are, need not be discussed. A summary statement of
the position in question may be found in Royce, The World and the Individ-
ual, vol. i, pp. 320-342. The position itself maybe labelled voluntaristic
idealism, or pragmatic idealism, or, as Royce calls it in his last book,
absolute pragmatism. (William James and Other Essays, p. 254. J

ON PRAGMATIC IDEALISM 159

are no independent points in a circle : every one is perfectly
bound and held by the central rule. In ellipses, there is a
struggle apart of centers, so to speak, — a certain mutual
independence in the two focal points, which loosens the attach-
ment of the curve to either. The central government of other
curves as defined by their 'equations,1 is variously strong:
in some of them, single points become detached ; in others,
whole regions break out in double boundaries. Wherever a
hump or projection or departure from the perfect round is
visible, there is the sign of rebellion, of incipient independence.
In the angle, we have a complete rupture of central control ;
two independent equations describe the two independent lines.
With this picture of dependence and independence in mind,
we might undertake with idealistic eyes to examine the
shapes of natural objects. In nature, our supposed ideal-

ist might report, we find no straight lines and no angles:
everywhere, if you examine closely enough you find the round,
the mark of subjection to some center. In any given organism
you find repeated everywhere the same curve — in eye, in
nostril, in spinal and muscular wave — the same reference of
every element to the type-cell and its central forces. This is
the report of the idealistic eye, which is always on the lookout
for signs of centrality ; and which may truly say that there
is nothing real and concrete which does not betray these signs
in every nameable feature. But now, look at the

same shapes with other eyes, with those of an imagined real-
ist, believer in the independent reality. Perhaps there are no
straight lines in nature, he might report, but on the other
hand there are no circles ; and the higher the effort of nature,
the less is the circle apparent. Nature, in fact, progresses out
of roundness toward angularity. Primitive animals, and sim-
ple orbits, may be nearly round ; but no developed animal is
round. In elliptical and elongated shapes we see signs of
rebellion, anew center struggling apart from the original one.
Humps, horns, heads, tails, autonomous internal organs, are
so many evidences of promising home-rule. In animals which

160 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

we regard as highly developed we find actual corners and
discontinuities of line : — see the square-blocked blooded bull;
compare the man with the infant ; note the loose play of limb
in quadrupeds as compared with the tighter bound organs of
bird and fish. So in the works of art that follow nature ; con-
trast the moon-faced people drawn by a school-boy with the
cross-hatched sketches of any master hand. Or observe the
line of progress from the round huts of the ancient Saxon,
the igloos of the Eskimo, the charcoal-burner's huts of Scot-
land, the Indian wigwam, and the like, — from these to the
square walls of the romanized English dwelling and our
modern house. Roundness is, in fact, the hopeless thing in
nature. So far as the organism is round and continuous
within itself, in so far it must live upon its own resources and
inertia, and has the promise of death. But wherever it crosses
reality, even the most primitive of organisms, wherever it
touches the sources of its continued life — in eating, in know-
ing, in giving birth — there is a breach in its body- wall ; there
it confesses discontinuity and dependence upon the independ-
ent. So the report of the realistic eye, on the lookout for
marks of independence, might answer and supplement the
report of idealism. To every sign of dependence which the
idealist can show, the realist can show a corresponding sign of
independence. We can decide, on such showing, neither for
one nor for the other.

To come now from our illustration to the matter itself : It
is not enough for the idealist to show that the mark of the
ego and its purposes is on every object of knowledge, and on
every phase of the object ; he must also consider whether the
mark of the non-ego is not equally pervasive. In so far as he
fails to do this, he leaves us dissatisfied. His argument savors
much of the logic by which Thomas Hobbes proved that by
virtue of the social contract, all acts of the Leviathan are in
reality my own acts, expressions of my own will — no matter
what the Leviathan may do, short of threatening my own safety
or existence. There is a Leviathan of our living universe also,

ON PRAGMATIC IDEALISM 161

to whom we are bound perhaps by some cosmic * contract,'
i.e., by some necessary consent of our absolute wills pre-
sumably further a wholly benevolent Leviathan : still his en-
actments strike upon my consciousness with the novelty of
independence — fruits of a purpose which may include mine,
but is not included in mine.

It is in vain also that pragmatic idealism shows that the
universe is everywhere what I would will it to be if my will
were wholly self-knowing ; or that when the scientific mind
submits itself empirically to the independent fact, it expresses
not alone its own purpose but its harmony with a great spiritual
fabric of conspiring purposes : these things may be true, but
they do not answer our question. There is nothing in reality
but that my will helps to make it what in my experience it
becomes : but is there anything in reality that I could wholly
have created ? is there anything that my purposes can wholly
define ? The universe fulfills my will ; but it is not definable
as the fulfilment of my will : it is That Which fulfills my will
— and much more besides ; first fulfilling its own independent
will. The universe has its own soul, and its own counsel which
is not mine. This is its independence.1

We admit the positive side of the idealistic argument ; what-
ever is real for us is real with our consent and cooperation.
As for its negative part, that nothing in reality is independent
of our will, we would turn tables on the idealistic argument.
In denying the reality of this independence, does the idealist
not implicitly acknowledge that very independence ? For he
means to make a statement to which we must assent, consult-
ing not first our wills and purposes, but solely the truth as it
is. By reality, idealist and realist alike mean that which first
is, and afterward is in accord with our purposes.

He who says that individuality is a postulate, not a fact ;

1 This point is further discussed and illustrated in the explanatory
essay "The knowledge of independent reality" The geometrical
illustration above used was originally a part of the article from which
this essay was taken.

162 RELIGIOUS FEELING AND RELIGIOUS THEORY

lie who declares that metaphysical being is an aspiration or
purpose, not a matter of experience ; is bound to account to us
for the source of these ideals and purposes. Ideals do not come
out of the void : postulates and moral principles are not whis-
pered to us in the form of " innate ideas " : it is on the spur
of experience that our wills adopt their aims and their deep-
est meanings. Whatever is present in ideal, is first present
in independent reality. In the order of existence we are first
passive and then active : though no analysis can separate our
passivity from our activity.

PAET m

THE NEED OF GOD
A SERIES OP FREE MEDITATIONS

PAET in

PRELIMINARY

WE do not know, in detail, what kind o£ world we
would desire to live in. Wisdom to devise such
a world we slowly acquire, and in infinite time may
possess y meantime we tend to assume that our per-
fectly enlightened wish would correspond not too re-
motely with the general description of the world as
we find it — at least that it would more nearly ap-
proach these curious and mysterious arrangements than
we now fathom. Further, there are certain major fea-
tures of our world whose value, or part of whose value,
can be made out. In adorning the figure of God the
wishes of men have certainly had large play: it is not
unimportant to enquire how much of this wish and will
is permanently valid, how much is the passing work of
a fancy too little self-conscious. "We have been told in
these latter days that a pluralistic world would be better
than a world of One Being ; that a world without an
Absolute would be wholly as good as with one; and
we have often been assured that God is no certain addi-
tion to human happiness, most lately by Mr. McTaggart.
Emboldened by these representations we may make a
few tentative excursions into this pleasant field of
world-willing before girding ourselves to the more stren-
uous labor of truth-finding — not forgetting, however,
that the question what we need is also a question having
a true answer.

CHAPTER

THE NEED OF UNITY: MONISM AS BEARING
ON OPTIMISM.

MONISM may be optimistic or pessimistic, as we
conceive the One Being to be good, bad, or indif-
ferent. Schopenhauer's One was blind, and its products
fit only to be swallowed up again. But monism at least
permits optimism, since a world that is One has a chance
of being safe. It may even be too safe. To the minds
of pluralistic writers monism offers too little scope for
freedom and adventure; there is not enough leeway
for risk and radical disaster ; not opportunity enough for
ultimate enterprise and knightly peril ; not enough sum-
mons to courage, to world-winning or world-losing wa-
gers and commitments. Because of all the surplus pro-
tection of monism, men are made flabby ; their skins are
safe, but their morals are in danger ; hence, the world
of monism proves no such safe world after all, when
you consider the whole man. A true optimism must take
the side of pluralism. This seems to me a fair and fruit-
promising issue ; for surely we will have no world in
which it is not possible to be optimistic, and without
danger to our moral fiber. Let us then attack our sub-
ject in this way : considering different brands of mon-
ism (for there are different brands), and enquiring what
brand of optimism (for there are different brands of this
also) is compatible with each brand of monism.

THE NEED OF UNITT 167

I

A few elementary observations may be made at the
outset, and got out of the way.

First, no optimism is possible without some kind of
monism. For in order to think well of your world, and
expect good from it, your world must at least have a
character. It must afford a basis for expectations or
probabilities. If the world were simply random, there
would be no such thing as probability in it, nothing
to build a reasonable hope or prospect on. There is no
pluralist who does not limit, and very profoundly limit,
the sort of chance and accident which he admits into
his world-picture. Change occurs, new things are born,
forces of many kinds drive at large, free individuals
assert themselves freely : but all this variety and novelty
takes place in digestible quantities. New creations are
to be noted; but they begin small, in a more or less
considerate manner, appearing in homes and other
places where they can be taken care of. The pluralistic
universe does not blurt and burst out in erratic and
immeasurable Facts, of unheard-of Kinds. The most
revolutionary things that happen there are revolutions:
each quietly contained for a time, in the form of a new
idea, within the compass of some man's head. The Mind
is in fact the hearth and brooding^place of such wild
Force and Novelty and Freedom as the pluralist most
wishes to make way for. And the fortunate circumstance
that these things have any brooding^-place at all shows
how important it is, even in pluralistic eyes, that the
new should come with some reference to the old; the
Many be not too fatally disruptive of the One. The

168 THE NEED OF GOD

world that any of us want to live in has, then, some
character of its own, innate or acquired, and hence
some unity upon which any man must build his
hopes.

Second, no optimism is possible without some kind of
doubt whether things are what they seem ; without look-
ing behind appearances. If the character of the world is
Good, or has good possibilities, this does not appear upon
the surface of experience. No justification for either
optimism or monism can be found there. The surface
of experience is pluralistic enough, tossing, various, dis-
tracted, challenging sanity if one lets himself go. And
this surface, if it has any general character, is not more
good than bad. The idea of evil did not arise in the
mind without illustration in experience : it is from this
surface that good and bad get their flavor and burden
of contrast. No man can be an optimist, then, without
going behind the superficial returns. The character
of the world upon which he bases his judgment must
be a real character, as opposed to apparent character :
your optimist must be something of a metaphysician,
something of a seer. He is an optimist only because he
has caught or achieved some glimpse of the Whole, and
some Idea therewith, which permits him a confident judg-
ment about the ultimate forces and grounds of sensible
experience: the facts he has about world-character
must be bottom facts, or they are worthless as a basis
for expectations.

Every optimism, then, involves a judgment about a
Reality, which has a character, and is therefore One. It
may appear to the judger that the unity of the world
is only achievable, not an accomplished fact : but if

THE NEED OF UNITY 169

the world is even achievably One, then it is already One
in a real, though more attenuated sense ; it has a char-
acter which makes it capable of being pulled together.

n

Optimism, we have said, must come from getting our
world into so much of a real unity that we can pass
judgment upon it as a whole. We may now observe that
this unity must be of a fairly substantial sort. There
are types of monism too attenuated to justify any gen-
uine optimism. Let us describe one or two such.

Our world has, for example, a certain formal unity.
This unity is to be seen in the fact that all objects of
experience, however various, are all alike objects of ex-
perience : must have so much in common as is implied
in their being thinkable by the same subject, all contain-
able within his comprehensive background of objectivity
and time. No one can mention any possible degree of
frantic chaos, but that in mentioning it as an idea of his,
he has made a unity of it ; has even presented it to us
in a frame. Beat the bush of self-contradiction with
sufficient skill and persistency ; always some such unity
can be corralled in the liveliest pluralism statable. But
any pluralism may grant you these bonds, without sub-
stantial menace to liberty : all fish of the sea are also
already caught in the fisherman's idea, and if not fur-
ther caught need not resent their captivity. But our
world must be further caught, if we are to be optimistic
pluralists; this degree of unity if it goes no farther can
support no concrete expectations. For anything, how-
ever disastrous, that could be fancied, would by the same
reasoning fit into the same frame of unity. Our opti-

170 THE NEED OF GOD

mism must affect the contents of our picture ; the unity
must obtain in the designs of the object, as well as in its
external relations to the subject.1

But there are also objective and concrete unities
which are still too attenuated. Idealism knows of such
unities, discoverable by applying this same method
of self-contradiction but more thoroughly. It may be
shown that this world of ours has a one-ness of Life,
or even of Purpose. If the real world has a conscious
selfhood, there is very substantial basis here for expec-
tations. But hardly enough for expectations of any
definite human color. For would we not have to
enquire what reference such world-purpose might have
to our own special situation; further, what fixes the
course of such purpose, spreading its career out in time
as if by some resistance; whether, then, in any finite
time the purpose reaches fulfilment ; and whether any
segment of history, such as may concern humanity, is to
move toward or away from the goal of our Good, in the
immeasurable rhythms of cosmic history? The fact of
the simple existence of a sympathetic purpose at the
bottom of Eeality may have some positive value, quite
apart from any practical expectations ; a question which
we may later on enquire into.2 But considered from
our present standpoint of expectation, any such unity
might consistently admit into its outline a retrogression,
damnation, or even extinction of human experience, if
there is nothing more known of it. Has not the good
God existed for long ages in the same world with hell

1 And such like external relations between its own parts as are
involved in that common relation to the subject, external to all of them.

2 Chapter XV.

THE NEED OF ONITT 171

and all devils, hell getting steadily fuller? — and may not
your One-purpose do as much, or even more? There
would seem to be still plenty of risk in such a world
for the most reckless pluralist. The Great Hunter
crashes through the World-forest in pursuit of His
quarry — not spoiling nor heeding our small chase, add-
ing if anything one more and chief excitement thereto,
that He do not tread on us !

In fact, must it not be said of any purely meta-phy sical
monism that it leaves our human situation and prob-
lems much the same as before ? It is astonishing, when
we stop to consider, how much monism we can define
without affording any substantial footing for optimism
— hence without cancelling any of the undesirable risks
of existence, to say nothing of encroaching on those de-
sirable risks which pluralism wishes to preserve. We
see how it is that pragmatic objections to monism have
been of two opposite tenors : one, that the world of
monism is a " block-universe " closing up all avenues
of chance; the other, that Unity is a wholly ineffective
and meaningless bond, making no difference whatever
in our outlook upon experience. It is worth while, as
against the first objection, to bring forward the second:
a single organism certainly does not ohne weiteres im-
ply a petrified organism. It is open to doubt whether
the fact of unity, by itself, implies anything significant
about the worldng-character of the thing unified. Let
us put the matter thus: if our monism is such as to pinch
the universe together only at that point from which it
emanates — whether in one cosmical and temporal point
of beginning, or in one permanent basis and pre-svppo-
sition — such monism gets no control over .the wild

172 THE NEED OF GOD

horses of Becoming, whether in our favor or against us.
Enough of this kind of monism.

in

If monism is to be of service to our expectations, it
must affect the apparent as well as the Real ; we must
indeed go beneath the surface of experience, where
good and bad meet on equal terms, but only for the
sake of prophetic control over that same surface in its
farther developments. Monism begins to offer signifi-
cant basis for our prospects when it seizes upon the
actual processes of the world, and declares that they are
all cases of One Process. In the nature of that One
Process can be read something of the presumable
outcome.

All the processes that we know are operations carried
out against resistance ; the unification of the processes
may well begin by a unification of the resistances, bring-
ing all practical problems together into one practical
world-problem. Unifications which thus begin with
unifying the resistances seem to set up dualisms instead
of monisms — as of light against darkness, Persian God
against Persian Devil, spirit against matter, and the like.
But such dualisms are not far from monism. For clearly
there can be no well-founded hope for good unless there
is some estimate of the resistance thereto ; and there can
be no estimate of the resistance unless such resistance
has its own unity.

Any theory of the world which represents all the
forces of the world as cases of one Force ; all laws as
cases of one Law; is thus unifying our problem, and
helping man to see his task as the task of spirit every-

THE NEED OF UNITY 173

where in a world of Nature. Such is the monism of
natural science : and indeed might not science be fairly
described as the effort to reduce the practical problems
of man to one problem ? O ur apparently hundred-headed
problem is One, and this one problem is the only prob-
lem there is in the cosmos. Whatever the ' trend of
evolution/ whatever impulse there is in the life of the
world, all becomes merged in, and subordinated to, the
human undertaking: the world-problem is our prob-
lem. Whence it appears that human preferences and
aversions as they become self-knowing are absolutely
valid — there being no Great Hunter with object other
than our own.

Such monism as this of effort and resistance is the
necessary beginning of any concretely significant mon-
ism. So long as resistances are plural, we are slaves to
each one severally ; the mastery of one gives no aid in
the mastery of another. There can be valid hope only in
a world in which the conquest of one difficulty is already
a partial conquest of another. Monism of this sort does
actually wipe out certain conceivable chances for hero-
ism, if heroism consists in infinite willingness to begin
again at Zero. But it does not eliminate the freedom and
variety of life — it alone makes such freedom and variety
possible. For the Many, in such case, are more tyran-
nous than the One ; in winning subjection to one master
we gain foot-looseness from indefinite tyranny of the
mob. In cosmic as in political affairs, man has many
powers over him ; and unless he find some one power
in which the powers of capital, of custom, of church, of
the mandarinate, of social pretence have their match
and solvent hfc is slave indeed, though he live under a

174 THE NEED OF GOD

" free " constitution. Freedom from the powers is found
in subjection to Power; as freedom from the ten com-
mandments is found in subjection to the one and great
commandment. Hence monism is at once fixity and free-
dom from fixity ; the only possible condition under which
freedom in the world of concrete enterprise can be won.

It is necessary, then, to any optimism, that there
should be unity in the conscious processes of the world;
and especially a unity of the resistances or evils, which
such processes have to meet. But this is not a sufficient
foundation for optimism. Optimism requires a further
judgment, namely, that the Real is the good, and not
the evil: i.e., that evil is an essentially conquerable
thing, not a reality co-ordinate with the purpose that is
against it. And herewith, as monism begins to be sig-
nificant, it begins also to justify the pluralistic criticism:
by reading the outcome into the prior constitution or
nature of the case, the world is made too safe, — and
the nerve of our responsibility, as well as the zest of
our personal importance is relaxed.

It is obvious that this judgment, that the Real is the
good and not the evil, stands at a critical pass in this
problem of monism. It is a judgment of many shades,
and some conclusion as to its worth may be gained by
considering how it is actually used in human affairs.

IV

The implicit assumption of the scientific view of things
is that every evil is to be remedied in time by our own
efforts. Conversely, there is a type of reaction to every
definable ill of our human condition which we might
well describe as the scientific reaction; that is, the effort

THE NEED OF UNITY 175

to refer the ill in question to causes, to conceive it as
a form assumed under definite conditions by the one
world-energy, and by mastering the conditions to mas»
ter the ill. The evil, in short, must be thoroughly
examined and known; to overcome it, we must first
become fully conscious of it.

But our world seems to be so constituted that many
a bad condition is not best cured that way. It happens
at times that an invalid may make a better bid for health
by ignoring his disease than by enquiring into it. As
for our moral faults, it is quite impossible to reach a
cure by the scientific reaction alone. If we tend to
ignore our own sins and win our moral salvation in large
part through determined self-respect — there is in this
instinctive attitude much moral lethargy, no doubt, but
some modicum of natural health of spirit. Willingness
to confront every evil, in ourselves and outside ourselves,
with the blunt, factual conscience of science; willing-
ness to pay the full causal price for the removal of the
blemish ; this kind of integrity can never be dispensed
with in any optimistic program. And yet we cannot
radically cure evil that way : the method of justice works
perfectly only in the world of scientific objects them-
selves, world of unconscious things. Wherever conscious-
ness enters we have to combine the scientific reaction
with another, one which involves turning away from the
defect and asserting in effect that the evil is less-than-
real, that the real is the good. There is a self-righting
tendency in conscious beings which has only analogies
more or less distant in nature* The system of movements
in such a group as the solar system has a certain self-
righting tendency ; a gyroscope will resume its own plane

176 THE NEED OF GOD

after disturbance not too great; any living organism has
still more remarkable self -restoring properties: but when
we are dealing with consciousness on its own ground,
or with any product of consciousness, with systems per-
sonal or social or political, self-righting becomes the
essential thing in all righting. This is the grain of truth
in the former laissez faire theories. This is the impor-
tant truth in the instinctive dislike of attacking the
social evil and its affiliations with the hammer and tongs
of scientific procedure and publicity. In these regions,
our world upholds a policy of working out the good by
over-attention to it and under-attention to its opposite.
The world behaves as if the good were the real.

I venture to say that there can be no real optimism
on the scientific basis with its type of monism. For not
alone are evils too numerous to be disposed of in this way.
It is also true that progress, with its income of new
pains and troubles, would involve continually greater
and not lesser suffering. If it were the destiny of
human life to pursue all evil by proportionate attention,
becoming first fully conscious of it and of its conditions,
a just consideration of the way in which life deepens
both in sensitivity and in demand must open the pros-
pect of our knowing pain and evil not less intensely,
but more intensely forever. Men differ much in their
disposition to yield the scientific method to the more
monistic method of ignoring evil. Some are unable to
enjoy a good until they think they have earned it, which
earning is another name for knowing the conditions and
complying with them, conditions fixed in the unity of
nature. Others demand without earning, and receive
much of what they demand. But even the most earn-

THE NEED OP UNITY 177

ing natures earn less than they think. For on the level
of experience-surface there is an overcrowding of possi-
bilities, too many features of the world to be attended
to; every man must choose which aspects of his world
he will look upon, forgetting the overwhelming major-
ity; and every man is led (even though he like to be
a pessimist) to select those aspects which best suit his
habit of thought and make a world-harmony for him.
Every one must fall back at last on vis medicatrix
naturce when working out his destiny, making mute
appeal to the proposition that the real is the good, and
the good the realgar excellence.

Optimism, I say, requires this degree of monism; —
belief in an individual Eeality not-ourselves which makes
for Tightness, and which actually accomplishes right-
ness when left to its own working. Does this, then,,
eliminate moral courage from the universe? making
things, on the whole, too secure? It must be answered
that there are right and wrong ways of taking this prin-
ciple, which in itself permits moral laxity and also
admits moral enterprise, as in a world of free men we
should desire — for what moral worth can there be in a
strenuosity which is a necessary condition of existence
itself, as in a pluralistic universe it must be ?

If ignoring evil becomes a conscious principle for
saving personal effort, it is bad — and also defeats itself.
Evil self -savingly ignored is not cured : the monism in
question is not mechanical in its operation. When seek-
ing forgiveness and getting it becomes routine, it ceases
to minister to moral progress. The ship of state has

178 THE NEED OF GOD

large inherent tendencies to go right, even if the helms-
man is tipsy and negligent — else what state conld last:
but when the helmsman begins to exploit this qual-
ity, adopting laissez faire policies for his own holiday,
the way to shipwreck is not long. Selective emphasis
becomes insolence when the goodness of Reality is made
a personal perquisite.

The true use of the principle seems to lie in this
direction: that the evil is not merely forgotten, but gen-
uinely disposed of by that to which the attention is
turned. If I assume of my neighbor that the reality of
him is good, and that his faults are relatively non-real,
this assumption is justified only as I actually grasp his
faults as the seamy sides of his virtues, having their
reality and their ultimate relief in the heightened life
of those same positive qualities, — his wrath as part of his
spirit, his hesitation as a phase of his self-consciousness —
to be relieved by more self-consciousness, his shiftlessness
an incident of his ideality — to be remedied by a more
vigorous ideality, not by mere battle against shiftless-
ness. Of ourselves, we know that when life is at low tide
our very strength stands against us and becomes our
fault and our viciousness ; whereas, when life is full, our
sin becomes our character, and fights for the good we
seek. Ignoring, then, is justified when the ill is known;
known as an alterable aspect of a reality which is good.
The whole necessary policy of efficient living, that of
concentrating upon a few positive aims, to the neglect
of much detail, is morally and practically justified (where
it is justified) only by a conscious monism of the sort
we have been describing. In fine, any and every radical
commitment to a single aim, heroic adoption of a cause

THE NEED OF UNITY 179

as one's own fate, ultimate risk and wager against des-
tiny, can be justified whether before morals or even good
sense, only if the meaning of the commitment in ques-
tion is this : that this thing to which I give myself is a
character of the One which is real and good, destined
to endure, held in place when established by all the self-
righting forces of the universe. The moral good which
pluralism demands can only be had, I say, on the basis
of the kind of monism here defined.

Justice and science pit wrong against wrong to make
right; thereby making good commensurate and homo-
geneous with evil. Justice and science must smell full
deep of every ill-odor in order to discard it. If we doubt
the universal worth of this method, it is because we
judge evil to be a shade less real than the good, some-
thing that can be displaced to some extent by simply
finding its place in a positive view of things — reduc-
ing its evil-ness to an error of position. This gives us
our responsible right to discontinuity. Such a view, we
may note, also involves a judgment that Reality is akin
to consciousness; for in terms of the causal network,
there is no other than the scientific method possible.

VI

It remains to be noticed that the monism here
described leaves a degree of pluralism in the universe.
Any principle of selection, which admits certain ele-
ments of experience into the Real and excludes others, is
incompletely monistic. The mind is a unity in process
of being made up ; in which process much that presents
itself is bundled out, discarded, as not to be knitted in
with the unity here being constituted : and whatever is

180 THE NEED OF GOD

true of the single mind, if the mind is an integral pa*t
of the universe, is true also of the universe. If any
materials of consciousness appear to the mind as loosely
attached, detachable, actually detached and excluded —
then in Eeality they are thus detached and excluded.
Any experience dropped by us is dropped absolutely.
Even though the One may attend to what we let go,
our letting go is one of the absolute facts; a stitch
dropped by ourselves is dropped by the World, irrevo-
cably dropped. The scientific method of disposing of
evil is more completely preservative of the outcast ele-
ments, hence in this respect more monistic: science
regards well what it will exclude, whereby the thing to
be excluded gains a kind of immortality in memory, at
least in the records and working of the mind — sci-
entific exclusion is thus no wholesale exclusion. But
otherwise the mind deals more ruthlessly with its con-
tents. Forgetting drops much experience-stuff out of
sight that has not been refused in the movements of
attention. Discontinuities abound in our inner history,
snapping off of thought-threads, wanderings, unfinished
business — never to be finished; moral discontinuities
also, in forgiveness and self-forgivenesses. Sleepings
and wakings, the fresh starts without which every
finite will would speedily be brought to despair, —
through all such our mental and moral world, so far
as its contents are concerned, takes on the aspect of
a series of geologic faults — departs from a scrupu-
lous monism in which every item is an equally valid
member of the Whole, by quite unmeasurable amount.
There is no monism on the level of events. History
falls by quantities into the abyss, and this is the

THE NEED OF UNITY 181

unstinted opportunity for our sifting — even yet all
too un-radical.

The only hope of finding the Keal to be one and
good is in such sif ting-right, in the circumstance that
the universe is not utterly organic, and that we are not
compelled to absorb into our structure all the false
scaffolding we have raised. Unless our monism were thus
saturated with pluralism and absolute death, we should
have no power to move under the burden of our past.
As old men, dying, free the race from their f ormulse,
so our deeds and memories die, and leave us new from
point to point; links drop out of sight in evolution and
in history; whole vistas of character evaporate into the
night, unpreserved, unpresentable by diary and mem-
oir. Whatever the ultimate goal of Reality there is
leisure for working it out; the creator has been gen-
erous with time, with the material of existence, the
cloth of history, and most of it is wasted. It looks at
times as if he had been equally prodigal of men. Only
the Nature of things is One and Good; all the "empiri-
cal stuff " is as yet unmeasured and unjudged.

There is, if this view be valid, no fixed quantity of
evil fortune mapped out in advance for every one ; no
fated "peck of dirt" for each one to eat: there is room
for just such hastening or retarding the One process as
there seems, in our consciousness of freedom, to be. The
One stands there, as our opportunity, not as mechanical
necessity. The monism of the world is such only as to
give meaning to its pluralism; our belonging to God
such only as gives us greater hold upon ourselves. True,
the heights of monism and of necessity we have not
scaled j nor shall we here attempt them. Suffice it to

182 THE NEED OF GOD

have shown that for the good of men, for their good-
hope as also for their rightful darings and commit-
ments, some concrete conscious monism is a necessary
condition.

CHAPTER XIV

THE NEED OF AN ABSOLUTE: REFLECTIONS
ON ITS PRACTICAL WORTH

HAS the Absolute, or the thought of an Absolute,
any human value of practical sort ? What interest
has that which is changeless to a world of movement and
change? what function in a world which deals every-
where with contingent realities could be performed by
a reality (if there were such) which is subject to no con-
tingencies, final, resting in itself — having no outside,
nor beyond, and so nothing to fear or to expect from
any external possibilities?

We know of no absolute stability in our physical uni-
verse, and yet we get on very well with our relative
stabilities ; build on the spinning surface of the earth,
walk on ship's decks, having mastered the art of treat-
ing any relative foothold as if it were, for the time being,
absolute, and yet without being deceived. Even the fall-
ing aviator feels that the earth is moving upward to
him. It is not otherwise with our truths in every depart-
ment of practice; we learn to use them within their
range of validity, treating them as if they were abso-
lute, but not misled by the practical worth of that assump-
tion, always ready (or almost always) to subordinate them
to another truth when their limit is reached. We can
treat our atomic weights as permanent, without needing
to deny conditions under which the dogma fails to hold

184 THE NEED OF GOD

good. May it not be the same with Eeality also, —
that a floating reality, a slowly changing and growing
world, a developing God, even — with finite and revis-
ahle thoughts and purposes, — may it not be that such
a universe would serve as well as one that is based on
an Ultimatum, an Eternal and Necessary Fact ? Nay
rather, may not such conditional reality be the only sort
we ever do or can make reference to ?

No better summary of the failure of the alleged
Absolute to make connections with human needs can be
given than these words of William James : " The abso-
lute is useless for deductive purposes. It gives us ab-
solute safety if you will, but it is compatible with every
relative danger. Whatever the details of experience
may prove to be, after the fact of them the absolute
will adopt them. It is an hypothesis which functions
retrospectively only, not prospectively." *

Like those too formal unities which we were recently
considering, the Absolute seems to be tolerant of any
kind of world-contents and experience-contents what-
ever : and therefore the idea of the Absolute seems to
throw no light on the kind of destiny one may expect,
suggests not one course of action rather than another,
in short " is useless for deductive purposes." " I have
noticed," once said an artist to me, "that perfection is
nearly always barren : a touch of ugliness is needed to
give life, action, instability." When one speaks of the

1 A Pluralistic Universe, page 111. This is not William James' only
word on the worth of an Absolute. I quote these words as the best state-
ment I can find of a typical opinion, not as a complete statement of his
opinion. In Pragmatism and later books, James became, consistently or
not, more or less tolerant of the Absolute, finding it useful as providing
* moral holidays/ etc.

THE NEED OF Aff ABSOLUTE 185

Absolute, we are reminded of some such well-closed per-
fection, all too successfully placed beyond the exigen-
cies of all living and striving; we doubt whether it
corresponds with any significant reality ; whether it is
not a name for some sort of logical problem, a name
handed back to us as an answer.

I cannot imagine any issue more vital to us than this.
Under various names we have been dealing with Abso-
lute Reality. Under the name of Substance, it appeared
as the anchorage which all idea-meanings seek ; it was
credited with internal relations to value of utmost import-
ance. Whether it had any bearing upon action (such
as "deductive purposes" imply) we did not expressly
enquire, though the name "non-impulsive background "
so far corroborates the comments of William James. I
am inclined to agree with the requirement that our First
Principle must be useful /or practice also, that it must
mean something in particular to the exclusion of some-
thing-else-in-particular, that it must be a principle from
which deductions can be made. I wish therefore to
enquire whether the Absolute is an object or concept
that we could do without. Let me put down certain
scattered reflections on this subject.

Something like the Absolute appears from time to
time in the history of religion; but it is noteworthy
that it is not worshipped. There is no temple to
Brahman. The Algonquins did not pray to Manitou.
Unkulunkulu, as most primitive near-Absolutes, is too
far off and has no interest in the affairs of men;
whence petitions must be addressed to the nearer and

186 THE NEED OF GOD

more finite spirits. The same judgment occurs a hun-
dred times in the various religions of the world. In
all religions have mediators of some kind corrected
the tendency of the great God-father to fall in with the
Absolute, giving the Deity effective human sympathies
and fighting interests. Ahura Mazda must have his
group of nature-gods and his retinue of Amesha Spentas.
Even Jahweh as he tends to be thought of as Abso-
lute ceases to deal with men in person and works only
through messengers or through the Logos. What we
need to worship is the seminal, disturbing, creating,
and destroying principle of Eeality : for which purpose
would not Siva be a better Deity than Brahm, the
ineffable and indifferent ?

Must not Eeality be a Eeal Force, a Eeal Mover, and
no Eternal Fact of changeless order? Whether for
worship, or for theory, or for common practice, we
need to reach an Ultimate which is no ultimate indif-
ference: something, rather, like an ultimate grit, a
principle that lends friction between wheel and belt,
which gives bite to the tool, plunge to the earth-dive
of the plow.

Still, we cannot dispense with a Changeless Ultimate
in our world. For practical life is not interested solely
in making differences. Indeed, action is never interested
in simply producing something different : it is always
interested in making improvement, which is to say,
change in a situation which itself is permanent. The
permanence of the frame of change has a value of its
own, if only this — that we find ourselves at home in it.

THE NEED OF AN ABSOLUTE 187

In the altered place we recognize ourselves because we
recognize our environment : these two things, self-iden-
tity and world-identity, go inseparably together. And
the degree of alteration which we can endure, even for
the better or best, is not indefinitely great. Any perma-
nent feature of the world will always have at least this

«/

value for action : it is a part of that which we are for-
ever moving toward — there will be something at the
last day which was also there at the first.

It may be well for us that the only changeless Being
in the universe is the Absolute, if there be an Absolute.
For no more definite shape could be so attractive but
that in time we should lose zest in moving toward it.
The Absolute binds us to no particular conservatism ;
impedes no possible rate of progress in terms of con*
crete experience. Here the unlimited hospitality and
indifference of the Absolute to contents of experience is
an advantage : " compatible with every relative danger"
— compatible, then, with every relative improvement*
Offering all the advantages of changelessness, with none
of the disadvantages of conserving the undesirable.

It is the presence of a Changeless Absolute that alone
could set us wholly free to grow. For otherwise we would
fix upon some concrete thing as a Changeless, something
which ought to be forever revisable, and then we must
either stagnate, or break.

Not only my own identity, but the identity of the
human mind as a species, is bound up with that changeless
identity of the ultimate object. We pass judgment upoa
the intellects, and estimate the world-guesses, of Newton,,
and Paracelsus, and Thales, and Lao Tze, and Moses:
we are able to do this only in so far as they, and we all.

188 THE NEED OF GOD

have been aiming at the same mark, thinking the same
world (not even, at bottom, a slowly changing world),
testing character upon the same nature. I£ a man's
philosophy is to be a faithful expression of his (e tem-
perament," he must in that philosophy single-mindedly
seek — the Absolute : for individual differences can be
individually significant, or even measurable, only as
tJiey accept the same aim and standard.

Identity of mind in the species is a consideration of
the same moment with sanity in general. We cannot
dispense with a Changeless Ultimate.

As a First Principle, the Changeless is of course
insufficient. Our Ultimate Eeality must have qualities
of both changelessness and change. Or, may it be that
the principle of change is furnished by ourselves ? Let
us consider this.

No Eternal Fact can of itself foster any practical
conclusions or deductions ; what one will do about it
depends on how one is disposed to take it. There is no
conclusion from one premise alone ; and in these prac-
tical affairs conclusions are drawn by concentrating the
changeless Facts in one major premise, while we carry
with us the minor premises which determine how we
shall respond to them. Let me illustrate :

Among the relatively stable features of our existence,
there is this one, that " Life is short." Well, — what is
to be done about it ? That depends upon the imagina-
tion of the individual; but in every case something is done
about it. One man pulls a long face ; becomes a pious
miser, begrudging every minute not spent in profitable

THE NEED OF AN ABSOLUTE 189

meditation — and when he says to a neighbor that life
is short, he expects to see the same practical consequences.
But hear old Omar announce to us this same eternal
truth, and notice his conclusion: parsimonious also,
toward the finite number of moments, but for fear he may
not live to drink his fill. His originality lies in his minor
premise. But indeed the shortness of life need mean
neither one conclusion nor the other; need mean no time-
parsimony of any kind. Why, for example, might it not
suggest leisureliness — since all fever-haste makes time
run the faster : only the typical Oriental knows how to
prize time — namely by taking time about everything.
If we rebel against the announcement of eternal facts,
it may be in part because those who have brandished
them have not allowed enough for these differences of
imagination, for the need of a minor premise : our proper
retort being that the eternal fact, by itself, has no con-
sequences at all. Not, indeed, unless there are some
necessary minor premises.

The Absolute, whatever else it may be, is the quint-
essence of Eternal Fact. May it be that the minor prem-
ise which makes that object significant for action is —
the Self? We must develop this consideration further.

Every circumstance, however trivial, which becomes
a spur to action, has something of the Absolute in it.
Is my corn ripe? — then I move, because my Real
World is unchangeably a world which presents to me
on this date ripe corn, an absolute and relentless fact of
history, never to be undone while reality is itself. But
beside the Absolute, my Self is necessary to account

190 THE NEED OF GOD

for my motion — all namely, that imagination presents
to me on the advent of ripe corn. The minor premise
lies in my Self. The world has its nature; the Self
has its character : when nature and character come
together, action results.

But nature and character are not two separable facts.
There is no such thing as character in men apart from
nature in objects. For character forms itself on the
reliabilities of the world ; is nothing else than my way
of response to the world's way of approach. My char-
acter is only seen and known in my actual dealings with
the habitual straits evolved by the nature of my world.
Since every deed is an exhibition both of nature and of
character, all behavior is symbolic, if we know how to
read the symbol. As one handles his bat, or his fork,
so will he treat his friends, his pecuniary obligations,
his holidays. Among other things, character is well
shown, perhaps chiefly shown, in one's grasp of nature
itself: given a congeries of facts, how much nature
(that is, absolute objective character) can you extract
from it — is not this a test of the man? Hence it may
be said that there is for us no such thing as nature in
things apart from character in men ; and my descriptions
of nature betray its reference to my approaches. Things
are described as hard, heavy, stubborn, yielding, impos-
ing, difficult, and the like : which of these qualities of
things (not to mention the primary and secondary qual-
ities of the classics) would have existed apart from the
conscious character that has to do with them? Nature
and character are fitted to each other, evoked by each
other, relative to each other throughout; and this by
virtue of the steadfast identity and absolute relation

THE NEED OF AN ABSOLUTE 191

between them. Given the Self and the Changeless, is it
somehow conceivable that all the rest should spin itself
out between? Is it not at least possible that in this
situation, character confronting nature, some principle
of differentiation may be found which will take away
the reproach of the Absolute ?
We shall come to this point again.

The Absolute ought not to be barren, for it is sup-
posed to be reached in answer to significant questions ;
as a last reply to enquiry. To say that it is useless for
deductive purposes is to say that it does not answer the
questions put. It will be enlightening to compare a
number of lines of enquiry which end in an Absolute^ to
observe, if we can, why the questions are not answered ;
or why they are thought not to be answered.

Consider, first, the epistemologist's enquiry: What
can I surely know ?

The meaning of the question is practical : nothing is
more costly than error, and who can understand his
errors? — only he who knows what he may be sure of.
But error seems to be incident to all judgments made
about external things, things physical, things social,
even things scientific and rational. The world waits for
a Descartes, who pursues these uncertainties to the end
and exhausts them : who finds his absolute assurance
at last. In doubting all things, I cannot doubt that
I doubt; and doubting, (that is, thinking), leodst.
Surely here is an Absolute. But is it useful for deduc-

192 THE NEED OF GOD

tive purposes? Descartes does not find it sufficient : it
is a great truth, but he uses it — not at all.

What is the trouble with Descartes' Absolute ? Is it
not this : that thisexistence-of-self is certain, whether my
knowledge of external objects succeeds or fails ? But the
task set before me, the task that stimulates my original
question, is that of knowing objects. It does not
answer my question to know that I can be sure of the
Subject. Hence it is that Descartes has to appeal to
the knowledge of God, through the "ontological proof "
— a way of leaping from the subject to the object, from
the idea to the objective fact.

What we want is absolute objective certainty ; and
this, Descartes' I-am fails to give us.

Descartes' mode of argument reappears in manifold
interesting forms in modern thought. As in reply to
the skeptic or agnostic, who asserts in despair that
there is no absolute truth. The dialectician retorts:
Then at least your own assertion must be absolutely true.
There must be some absolute truth, for you cannot
assert that there is none without self-contradiction. As
in Descartes' case, the doubter is reminded of himself.
There, in his own assertion, is a certainty from which
he cannot escape.

This turn of thought which reminds the enquirer of
himself y we shall call the reflexive turn. It reappears
in all discoveries of the Absolute. It is clinching — but
is likely to disappoint, even as Descartes' result disap-
points. For the skeptic finds that he also was in search
of objective truth : and that the absolute truth of his

THE NEED OF AN ABSOLUTE 193

statement is irrelevant to his quest. Whence his skep-
ticism toward objective truth remains unanswered.

Consider the question of the moralist, who likewise
has an Absolute to seek — an absolute rule of conduct.

Rules against killing, appropriating property, and the
like, have their exceptions. Moral principles vary with
social conditions and times. Everything is relative:
is there not some underlying principle that will stand-
ardize all this relativity, and give a substance to moral
certainty ? The world waits for its Kant ; who provides
the reflexive turn in morals. No empirical rule is abso-
lute ; but one fixed rule there is, — observe Ride. It
is, as Professor Palmer puts it, the "law that there
shall be law." Let your conduct be law-abiding, law-
recognizing, law-constituting; if you have exceptions
to make from any rule, let them be made "on prin-
ciple," principle in general. For the absolute tightness
lies not out there among deeds, but in the self, in its
fixed principle of duty.

Shall we not herald Kant as the savior of an absolute
morality? Yes; — but what exception to rule is not
made on some principle or other? Kantian morality is
regarded as rigoristic, but does its rigor come from its
first principles, — or from its second principles, alleged
deductions from the first, but of doubtful parentage?
Kant, like Descartes, must emerge into the world of
objective situations, must appear with a principle that
has somewhat to say about dealing with objects, with
beings beyond oneself. Treat persons as ends in them-
selves, says Kant; and herewith, in setting up an objec-

194 THE NEED OF GOD

tive principle, tie confesses that his reflexive turn does
not afford sufficient answer to our ethical enquiry.

Consider the metaphysician's question : what is the
absolutely real? That, namely, which exists by itself,
not depending on any other being for existence ; but
conferring being on every other.

Here again, trial of various would-be realities, like
matter, or force, or energy, shows that they cannot be
what we seek. Matter disappears, on analysis, into ac-
tivity of energies ; and energy seems to disappear into
a definition, or formula, regarding what we may expect
from experience. No nameable thing can answer the
demand for an objective Substance. The world waits
for its Berkeley: who hits upon the reflexive turn —
everything is dependent on consciousness except conr
sdousness itself. To be, says Berkeley triumphantly,
means to be perceived, or to be a perceiver; reality is
consciousness and its world.

Such discovery, following much despair about finding
Substance, cannot fail to excite much joy. The reflexive
turn is wonderful, unanswerable : yet strangely paradox-
ical, is it not? — as if for bread one were given a stone,
one can hardly say how. At last it appears that what
one sought was an absolute reality beyond oneself; for
one's ontological interests come from questions about
Pate, questions about what I may expect from the action
upon me of that which extraneous to me is real. I start
from the fact that I do not determine the contents of my
own experience; and no matter how much you assure
me that the Absolute is Self, it must still be beyond

THE NEED OF AN ABSOLUTE 195

this self which knows its own ignorance and so its
dependence. What you have offered me for reality is
but another Cartesian I-think, which must indeed (as
Kant puts it) accompany all experience (or be able to) :
but just because it is a coefficient of all experience, it is
a determinant of none — " compatible with every relative
danger." Useless for deductive purposes. No genuine
answer to our question.

There are not a few other such enquiries and absolute
solutions that do not solve. There is the quest for an
absolute good, or happiness, which brought out perhaps
the first pure case of the reflexive turn in history — the
Stoic answer, namely, that I myself am my own absolute
good. Then there is the religious quest itself, the quest
for " salvation," which is a search for an absolute secu-
rity against death : and which at times, especially in
these latter times, has received the answer " I myself
am heaven and hell " : or in more adequate Spinozistic
reflexion, my knowledge of the Eternal is my own eter-
nity. Compatible, all such answers, with too much.

The same principle is involved in all of them. It is
the reflexive turn that makes the trouble and creates
the disappointing illusion of finality. We have reached
in each case a universally valid answer — but it is not
an answer to our question: it is an irrelevant universal.
It has the fault of retreat into the subject; a well-
exposed fault in the case of Stoicism, and of Berkeleian
idealism, and of Kantian morality (as criticised, some-
what unfairly, by Hegel), a fault still mightily influential,
however, wherever dialectic and idealism flourish. It is

196 THE NEED OF GOD

this reflexive turn and its products which rouses the
pragmatic ire. If I forsake matter for form, one may
say, I surrender my right to regain any touch with
matter. If I slip from the object into the subject, let
me candidly forgo any power over the object. If I
leave the world of physics to consort with pure spirit,
let me not claim any other than a Platonic relation to
empirical reality — relation without fruit or progeny.
That too safe thing which in denying I affirm is, after
all, something that I have not denied nor ever doubted.
I sought an Absolute in the field of man's work.

Of all these irrelevant universals, found by the
reflexive turn, one surmises that they have a certain
significance, if not that which is claimed for them. It
cannot be worthless to have pointed out that while our
world of ohjects is refractory, baffling, and offering no
point of fixity or perfect assurance, there is a world
within where abiding satisfaction obtains: we object
only to the substitution of this latter world for the
former, as a co-ordinate and difference-making affair.
Eeflexive turns are backward glances; and all these
considerations have a worth looking backward which
they do not possess looking forward. They " function
retrospectively only, not prospectively." In the same
way, the pious soul thanks God, looking backward, for
everything that has happened: everything that has hap-
pened is goody — not so everything that may happen.
When next I have to thank God, let it be for something
different; and in the meantime the guide to my conduct
will not be that God-idea which has proved "compatible

THE NEED OF AK ABSOLUTE 197

with every relative danger." Some principle we must
have which charges those forward-looking paths with
contrast, which acts like the physiologist's stain, distin-
guishing tissue from tissue. That which is thus to func-
tion prospectively cannot be this Absolute.

Yet there are situations in experience in which form
becomes matter, and the reflexive turn does acquire prac-
tical significance.

In the work of science, for example, a formal arrange-
ment of the materials of a problem is the beginning of
an explanation. To classify data, to establish external
connections among them, is the beginning of mastery;
is a very substantial practical mastery* The assemblage
and comparison of unknowns generates known-ness, as
friction of cold and dark objects may produce heat and
light. Science has begun to question whether any other
conquest of Nature is either possible, or desirable, than
just this of establishing order and law among phenom-
ena — not trying to penetrate their objective interiors,
doubting at last whether there be any such interiors,
external to ourselves ; doubting whether we are not the
interior of Nature. Here the product of the reflexive
turn is accepted by nearly everybody as the only prac-
tical thing in sight.

In moral affairs, also, we recognize the substantiality
of the form in certain limiting cases. A person who
wills to have a good will, already has a good will — in
its rudiments. There is solid satisfaction in knowing
that the mere desire to get out of an old habit is a
material advance upon the condition of submergence in

198 THE NEED OF GOD

that habit. The longest step toward cleanliness is made
when one gains — nothing but dissatisfaction with dirt.
Surely the work is not finished — but the obstacles that
remain are material only ; the fateful question was whether
one could get the idea of cleanliness, or of truthfulness,
or of the good-will generally. In that idea is the reality
of the condition ; the practical questions are all resolv-
able into this one, — the maintenance and development
of that idea.

There is, then, in these matters some absolute find-
ing in the seeking : salvation is, to seek salvation, for
in seeking it one has already abandoned his mortal-
ity and his sin. In religion or in morals the question
can never be, How much is empirically finished ? but
rather, What beginning is made? for any beginning is
the birth of an idea, and the anticipation of attainment.
To cast off an old type of conception and forge a new
one is the greatest of all practical moral achievements.
Compatible with every relative vice, is this Absolute ?
Compatible with everything it rises upon, and there is
presumably nothing so vicious that the absolute cannot
rise upon it in the form of idea : yet not compatible
with remaining therein. This merely formal conceiving
of the facts of one's own wretchedness is at the same
time a departure from them — placing them in the
object. It is not idle, therefore, to observe reflexively
that in that very Thought, one has separated himself
from them, and is no longer that which empirically he
still sees himself to be.

In many other connections do we find " mere " forms
making practical differences. Nothing is more indiffer-
ent to all its contents than time; yet time is one of

THE NEED OF A1ST ABSOLUTE 199

the greatest agents in the social world. Long-standing,
whether of customs, of offices, of friends, of peoples, is
no merit, one might say : yet it is everywhere operative
as such to some degree (not preventing French revolu-
tions but delaying them). Age of service, quite apart
from brilliancy of service, claims gratitude and honor-
able discharge : old age, of itself, apart from its contents
receives respect ; and antiquity is all but equivalent to
sanctity. The mere mechanical and empty infinity of
space and time may introduce the spirit into the pres-
ence of Deity ; and to survey the Whole, in any capac-
ity, will work differences in the judgment of details.

In all such cases, that which is found in reflexion, —
retrospectively, — functions prospectively also.

In truth, the reflexive thing is the easiest in the world
to ignore j because it does require this almost un-natural
reversive glance of thought to discover : and ignoring
it leaves out an essential in all ultimate solutions. I do
not say that it is a sufficient solution of any problem ;
I point out that it is a necessary ingredient of the solu-
tion.

Offered as a sufficient answer, the reflexive turn is
indeed the essence of sentimentality : hunger is not
relieved by Stoical reflexion on the inward conditions of
happiness (mentally inward). But to offer the hungry
a meal without any of that spaciousness of idea which
the sentimental soul too f ulsomely invokes ; to omit, I
say? your reference to the Absolute, somehow spoils
the value of your practical charity. I agree that it is
well to be meager of sentiment : but I merely indicate

200 THE NEED OF GOD

a fact of human nature when I say that the thing done
" in the name of Christ/' or by one who wears the cowl,
or in the simple presence of humanity to Idea, leaves a
tinge of worth behind it which no amount of practi-
cal Aid, apart from the " irrelevant universal " could
accomplish.

It is no sufficient solution of grief to say that grief
must have a solution j but the only hopeless grief is that
which abandons the postulate that grief has any mean-
ing. Point out that in holding to that postulate there
is already a superiority to the condition that depresses
one j and you reveal a situation which caught in idea
does materially lighten the grief. To know that suffer-
ing is a common human lot may not empirically change
the contents of pain ; yet there is no reflexion which
more substantially relieves the pressure of actual dis-
tress. Let me take my bereavement, said Epictetus, as
I take the bereavement of my neighbor: yes, but not
because you look coldly on his trouble — rather, because
you are free to reflect in his case what must enter as
idea into your own, that this is the lot of man, —
through which irrelevant universal fact, see mankind
actually held in closer unity. To see in the man before
me my brother does not help me to deal with him; does
not substitute for judgment, discretion, antagonism in
its place ; does the idea then do no work ? Let him
answer who is able to hold the fact of brotherhood
before his mind, in the midst of his antagonism.

THE NEED OF AN ABSOLUTE 201

So long as the mind is admitted a part of reality at
all, it must be a material part. Differences which are
made to mind must tend to become differences to mat-
ter. The presence of reason, though it does no more
than throw its noose of idea over the contents of experi-
ence, makes different every experience. Reason has the
function of leading to pleasure and avoiding pain ; but
the default of reason which exposes to pain adds still
another pain — the pain of the defect of reason. Self-
consciousness, like other psychoses, leaves tracks in the
brain ; our physical groundwork takes notes of our
reflexive doings as of other doings, and transmits the
habits of our ideal attitudes. The irrelevant universal
to all our experiences is collectively named, the Self ;
the Subject, present to all experience, inclusive of all,
compatible with all ; yet if this self were indeed indiffer-
ent to all, useless for deductive purposes, Self could
never have become its own object, self-consciousness
would be impossible. In being thought of, the self
is made a member of the world of experience, and
acknowledged as active there. It is thought of, be-
cause in being thought with, it has had differences
to make.

And here may we not observe how the internal rela-
tion of idea to value becomes also an external relation,
determining differences of conduct? The maintenance
of the idea of the Absolute in any subject-matter is a
matter of effort and of will ; the degree of value which
any situation or prospect may have is dependent upon
the actual operation of an irrelevant universal which a
reflexive turn of thought might discover. But an altera-
tion of value is an alteration of conduct. This is the

202 THE NEED OF GOD

substance of our answer to the question regarding the
worth of the Absolute.1

The absolutes which are found in the reflexive turn of
thought are not useless, even prospectively. But their
functioning has seldom or never been understood, even
by those who have hit upon them : and this is, in part,
because they have often failed to observe that the reflex-
ive turn reveals never alone the Absolute within, but
always the Absolute within in conjunction with the
Absolute without.

The whole tale of Descartes* discovery is not told in the
proposition, I exist, knowing. It is rather told in the
proposition, I exist, knowing the Absolute; or, I exist,
knowing God. The self, taken alone, or in presence of
contents of experience as they come, is a fairly irrele-
vant universal. But set before that self in its dealings
with experience an Absolute Object ; and its own exist-
ence becomes fruitful of differences. For note :

The self might conceivably be a passive spectator of
the contents of experience, accepting " the colours of
good and evil " as unalterable fact. That which starts
the search for the Absolute is an unwillingness to take
things in this way. Beside the love for the satisfactory
contents of life, there is a most remarkable love of life
itself — in distinction from its contents, even if the con-
tents are generally badj some in whom this love of
existence is strong have said that they would prefer to
endure hell rather than to be extinguished — a most
inexplicable attachment, this, to the bare fact of exist-

1 See farther, Fart VI, The Emits of Religion, chs. mi and *•**«

THE NEED OF AN ABSOLUTE 203

ing, being conscious, without reference to the contents
of consciousness. Surely, if ever there were a blind
valuation o£ an empty husk of irrelevant universal,
it is here. Yet, with our interpretation of value,1 is not
this same celebrated and mysterious "instinct of self-
preservation," the most fundamentally rational of all
practicalities ? For life is but a certain consciousness of
the Absolute, in process of application ; and the applica-
tion of this Idea is the substance of all positive worth,
conferring upon "contents" what quality they have*
Attachment to life is simply attachment to the source
of value; and that which appears evil does so appear
because the Real cannot be recognized in it, creates a
problem of which the living thing already holds the key.
Evil becomes a problem, only because the consciousness
of the Absolute is there : apart from this fact, the "col-
our of evil " would be mere contents of experience.

It is true, then, that What Is makes no difference ;
that which produces difference is Consciousness of What
Is.

This pair of Absolutes, or Absolute-pair, which we
above described as Character in presence of Nature, is
well capable of producing practical difference ; might
well be described as the original source of all difference,
perhaps. For if we begin with simply a consciousness,
and its object-absolute (not Sein and Nicht-sein, but
Sein and Bewusstsein) we have all that is necessary to
develop change (Werden). It is notorious that what
endures before consciousness does not endure the same;

1 Chapter xi, above.

20£ THE NEED OF GOD

this fact has its psycho-physical explanation, its Weber's
law, and the like : its essential explanation may be this,
that any object of consciousness, simply as object, i.e.,
as case of Reality, is so far good, and therefore — to be
approached, or increased in vividness. Whereas what
simply stays as blind datum is in its mere persistence bad,
to be withdrawn from, diminished in vividness to zero.
Briefly, Sein and Bewusstsein together give Werden.

The Absolute, after all, is not an escapable practical
problem; and no showing that wrong solutions have
been forthcoming will destroy the practical worth of
the right solution. Knowledge of the Absolute re-
mains as practically significant as the question which
perennially gives rise to the search for it.

And this question always calls for just such an indif-
ferent object as the absolutes, in each of our various
cases, turned out to be. If we could accept the differ-
ences of experience as they stand, there would be no
problem of unity ; but if we cannot accept them, there
is nothing to look for but an in-different. Either we
are content with conditional certainties, or we seek a
certainty that holds everywhere, — and is thus com-
patible with everything. If the absolute good were not
compatible with every relative evil, it would not be the
absolute good. If the Absolute were not compatible
with every relative danger, it would not be the Abso-
lute* That which holds good, no matter what occurs,
— that is precisely the object of our search.

THE NEED OF AN ABSOLUTE 205

Such an object is no modern discovery. From the
beginning of religious thought, in the very conception
of a creator, there has been present to the mind of man
a Being who is present alike in good and evil. In
quite ancient times, as times go, we may find a wholly
explicit definition of such a Being as the desire of all
mankind. The founder of a popular religion held up
to the minds of a spell-bound multitude, as his own
original revelation, a God who " maketh his sun to rise
on the evil and the good, and sendeth rain on the just
and the unjust." Upon this basis he defined the "per-
fection " of God, and summoned men to the same per-
fection, the same absolute bearing. Thereby he defined
an attitude of mind which was indeed new in that
world, an attitude of equal treatment toward friend
and enemy, toward good and bad, — an attitude much
garbled and misunderstood, but an attitude wholly intel-
ligible in the light of that unmistakable description of
the Absolute God. For how could the new attitude be
better defined than as an attitude of absolute justice,
a thing quite alien to the proportionate justice of the
Greeks, wonderfully similar to absolute in-difference and
in-justice ? Is this attitude then actually in-different,
and useless for deductive purposes ? On the contrary,
it is the only radically creative attitude yet known to
humanity. Its operation was dimly announced some
six hundred years earlier by a solitary Chinese sage,
who said : " I meet good with good, that good may be
maintained ; I meet evil with good that good may be
created." Do we not here discover the Absolute func-
tioning prospectively?

The secret of this creativeness we shall in time pursue

206 THE NEED OF GOD

in some detail, 1 at present it is sufficient to refer to our
own doctrine of the substance of Value. There is we
may presume, something in the mere fact of divine at-
tention to ohjects which confers value upon them ; or to
put it in the language of Professor Royce, it may be
that divine attention is the same thing as divine love,
and that love of this sort is the one thing in the world
that is creative.

We could not live without the Absolute, nor without
our idea of the Absolute. I do not say that the Abso-
lute is equivalent to God ; I say that God, whatever else
he may be, must needs also be the Absolute. Thus,
accepting fully the pragmatic guide to truth, we con-
clude that the only satisfying truth must be absolute,
— that is, non-pragmatic. Wherewith, pragmatism ends
in consuming itself ; appears as a self-refuting theory.

1 See especially chapter :

CHAPTEB XV

THE NEED OF A GOB1

TN our usual conceptions of God, the One and Abso-
J- lute is raised to the level of personality and moral
quality. These latter characters are indeed more con*
spicuous, both in current meaning and in history, than
either unity or absoluteness. They may well be regarded
as the most humanly valuable attributes of the divine
nature. Yet they are the oftenest subject to criticism
and doubt. More in their case, perhaps, than in that
of the others will it be important to enquire whether
they are needful features of our Whole-idea.

In a recent book by Mr. McTaggart, called " Some
Dogmas of Religion " this question is discussed 2 in so
clear, frank, and radical fashion that we shall gain much
by stating our view in relation to his.

If the thought of God is of any worth to us, says
McTaggart, it must be either because of what God is,
or because of what God does. It is conceivable that to
believe in the simple existence of a being having such
character and powers as we suppose God to have would
make life better worth living for us. It is also con-

1 In somewhat different form, this chapter was read as a critical paper
before the Philosophical Union of the University of California in 1907.
a In the concluding chapter, entitled " Theism and Happiness."

208 THE NEED OF GOD

ceivable that apart from his character and attributes,
we should set store on the thought of what God does
or can do for us and for the world at large. Let us
estimate each of these two conceivable values of the
God-idea, beginning with the supposed works of God.

God's presence in the universe means to most believers
the presence of a very powerful champion of certain
righteous causes of immense historic range. We think
of God as a vindicator, working out that deeper jus-
tice which shall bring together at last the innermost
merit and its external recognition. We think of him
perhaps as causing happiness and brotherhood to pre-
vail among men at some future time. Or we think of
him simply as security to our souls that in some hidden
way all is well, or will be well, with the world.

But every legitimate hope or confidence must have
some foundation in experience or reason: the sort of
thing we are pleased to believe must be at least not-
inconsistent with what the world as it is shows us. If
God exists, there are certain conditions existing in the
same world with him which throw light on his char-
acter and powers. Unmerited, random, and general
suffering are conditions, not theories. Iniquity and
degradation are conditions. Nowhere do we have to
search for evil amid the good : we have to search for
the good amid the evil. Further, what good we have
is unstable in its whole fabric, as if it were upheld
against the nature of things : life is a constant fight
against decay ; civilization a perpetual struggle against
dissolution; and virtue itself incessant strain against
the clamor of flesh and the devil. Now God — if he
exists — has either permitted this, or else it exists in

THE NEED OF A GOD 209

spite of him: in either case what can we reasonably
depend upon for the futnre?

It is the same dilemma on which McTaggart has
often insisted. If there were an all-powerful God, the
defects in his world would show defects in his charac-
ter. Whereas, if God is wholly good, and therefore
not all-powerful, it is at least possible that the mass of
evil in the world may prove greater that he can cope
with. In either case, the works of God are of no very
tangible value.

In truth, these supposable works of God would be of
no value at all for human happiness until we had some
further knowledge about them. We should have to
enquire, as best we can, how this world is constituted ;
and what are the actual forces at work; we should
have to estimate from the basis of our own experience
what the likelihood is of any conquest of evil whatever.
We must carry our science to the point of metaphysics
by our own unaided efforts before we are warranted in
taking any satisfaction in the contemplation of what
God may do for us. And in the progress of this meta-
physical work, we are likely to discover — so McTag-
gart intimates — that good can gain the upper hand of
evil without the assistance of a God. Idealism, which
resolves matter into spirit, and shows that against spirit
matter must be ultimately powerless ; especially per-
sonal idealism, which puts the power of spirit into the
joint possession of a co-operating society of persons
such as this world of ours in some measure already is,
and may in larger measure become, without limit, —
especially personal idealism may give us all that God
has been supposed to offer, and without the moral

210 THE NEED OF GOD

detriments iDVolved in relying upon a supernatural
ally for doing the work of men. Happiness depends
(so far as events are concerned) on grasping that total
law and tendency of things, wherein we can read the
ultimate doom of all existing defects in our condition ;
and it is more than possible that this law may be found
in our own personal and social nature, if we but pene-
trate to its foundations.

So much for the appearance of God in the sweep of
human history. But how about that part of individual
destiny that lies beyond human sight? It has been
believed that men cannot be wholly happy without the
expectation of immortality, and the supernatural com-
pensations that have become associated with that belief.
In reply, McTaggart points out two things. First, that
immortality is no more an unquestionable benefit than
are the visible works of God. Certain great religions
of the East, as well as certain philosophies of the West,
have led men to find their highest good in personal
extinction. And secondly, hope of immortality does
not depend on belief in God. It is possible that the
soul is intrinsically superior to the crises of material
bodies, even if it were a solitary being in the cosmos.
The prospect of individual immortality must be gained
if at all by the same painstaking scientific and metaphys-
ical enquiries as justify our confidence in human wel-
fare : we must learn of what stuff we are made, and what
sort of contingency that stuff is intrinsically subject to.
An immortality thus established would be much more
satisfactory to our thought than one dependent upon
lie good will of a finite God: for it would be founded
upon the nature of things. God and immortality are

THE NEED OF A GOB 211

wholly separable articles of faith, and no interest which
we may have in the one can lend any interest to the
other.

The works of God, then, do not at once recommend
him to our needs. But we may still have an interest
in his existence, for the sake of the guidance, or the
encouragement, or the love and worship which his
presence in the universe would provide. Let us again
look closely and consider what these things are worth.

As far as guidance is concerned, the moral ideal is
one which we can never discover unless we already bear
it in ourselves. Given a God, we should first needs
pass judgment upon him, on the basis of our own knowl-
edge of good and evil, before adopting him as our
standard. It is true that we need the suggestion of a
quality, oftentimes, in something beyond us, before that
germ which is in us can awaken to life. But this type
of suggestion is much more available in our fellow men
than in the mere thought of a God whom we do not
see, and whose acts we can only infer. Guidance must
stand very close to us to be of any value. The circum-
stance that God is god and not man makes any applica-
tion of his character to our own case difficult, even if
we perfectly knew his character. Hence men have been
fascinated by the conception of the God-incarnate, vis-
ible in the flesh, in all points tempted like as we are.
But just in so far as even the divine man fights evil
with the weapons of God, and not with those of men,
his case fails to be applicable to mine ; and the guidance
fails. What is done by man we can call upon men to
reach ; what is done by the god-man stands just beyond

212 THE NEED OF GOD

the region of my responsibility. What goodness, in
the end, can effectively guide and inspire us but the
goodness which we observe and recognize in those whom
we must judge to be in all essentials such as we our-
selves are?

But there are still other interests than this one of
moral guidance to which the existence of a God might
minister. There is the encouragement which some
minds find in considering that there is in the world one
morally sublime person. There is the comfort which
others find in the thought of a moral leader whose sur-
vey is great enough to include the whole field : if I am
too weak to fathom the total meaning and drift of
things, it is good to think that there is one who does.
Loss of such value as this encouragement and comfort
might bring would not be wholly made good by human
substitutes : yet the gap that would appear in the world
would, in all probability, not be irreparable. Remem-
ber that God, if he exists, is at best an imperfect Being.
God cannot escape his share of the imperfection which,
in this universal society of imperfect spirits, is a run-
ning stain. What men can lose in the loss of a God
like this, is only such value as they may regain, in some
degree if not in full, in their fellows. When men
believed in the divine right of kings, they could not but
apprehend that the spirit of loyalty must vanish in the
spread of democracy. But loyalty lives, not less but
possibly more, in the government of society &y itself
than in the alleged divine kingdoms. So with the loss
of the conceived God, something of spiritual shelter and
canopy is removed, without which the soul may well for
a time feel naked and alone : " There will be no one

THE NEED OF A GOD 213

to -worship, and there will be one person less to love."
But reverence and love are not left without objects:
and who knows but that the necessity of confining
the range of these highest of human sentiments to the
members and causes of visible society will in time
exalt human relations, and accelerate the attainment
of perfection ?

" Whether the friends whom all men may find could
compensate for the friend whom some men thought they
had found is a question for each man to answer. It is
a question which can never be answered permanently
in the negative while there is still a future before us."
Thus McTaggart closes his argument.

II

This argument makes remarkably vivid to what
degree the values commonly centered in God are repro-
duced in kind in other relationships, to nature, to friend,
and to society. Mr. McTaggart has mentioned no value
of God unique in kind except the value of worship, and
even this seems to him fairly well recovered in human
reverence. One might question whether all possible
values of a personal God had been considered j whether
the primary worth of such a being is not unique in
kind, such as the worth of these other relationships
would not substitute for. But without pressing this
point, I wish first to caD attention to certain logical
peculiarities of the argument.

One is struck by the fact that the argument is highly
tentative and hypothetical, calling for further meta-
physical investigation, and depending for its proposed
substitutes for the worth of God on what metaphysical

214 THE NEED OF GOD

investigation might probably show, if we once vigor-
ously put ourselves to it.

I cannot but assent to this call for metaphysical
enquiry. I believe with McTaggart that men have no
right to the satisfactions which their religion affords
them except as they earn that right by successful meta-
physical thought. We cannot pass at once from our
needs to the satisfaction thereof, without considering
what that reality is from which we must obtain satisfac-
tion. "What people want," says McTaggart, "is a re-
ligion they can believe to be true"; than which nothing
could be better said. Yet right as McTaggart is in
referring us to metaphysical thought to find the objects
on which we shall hang our major values, just so wrong
is he in basing conclusions on what such enquiry may
probably show. For in advance of the actual enquiry,
there can be no probabilities in the case: metaphysical
thought will show one thing, or it will show another;
but forecastings of what it may show signify simply
nothing. In order that there may be any probability
in a given field of enquiry, something in that field
must be certain. Probabilities support themselves inva-
riably on known laws. Hence any enquiry which
attempts to find the basis of all certainty, the ultimate
thing, is in advance of all possible use of probabilities;
it is trying to pave the way for them — they cannot pave
the way for it. Hence no metaphysical hypothesis is
antecedently more probable than any other.

It follows that as long as we have only probabilities
and hypotheses to refer to in these matters we have
nothing at all. If the belief in God is simply an hypoth-
esis, as for McTaggart it seems to be, we should be more

THE NEED OF A GOD 215

Tadical than he; we should say outright that it is worth
nothing at all. Ideas have certain sustaining powers,
even though they are wholly our own fabrications ; but
no idea that is such a pure launch of our own imagina-
tion into the unknown — and nothing more — has any
permanent sustaining power. We must take McTaggart
strictly, therefore, at his own word, and demand that
all attempts at circumstantial evidence on questions of
dogma be excluded as irrelevant; that religion shall
at all points be built on metaphysical knowledge and
nothing else. God can be of any worth to man only
in so far as he is a known God.

Happily, metaphysical knowledge is the most univer-
sal kind of knowledge; the infant's first thoughts are
metaphysical, that is to say, thoughts of Reality — though
not by name and title. The chance for finding God of
general human value is built on the prospect that God
may be found in experience, f experience' being the
region of our continuous contact with metaphysical
xeality.

Now God can appear in experience only through some
working of his. If no effect of God were visible in the
world, his existence must be always a matter of conjec-
ture. Or if God works in the world, but in such man-
ner that we can never identify any work as his, his
existence must be a matter of conjecture. If God's
whole office in our behalf is that of touching only the
august and inaccessible points of destiny, — to decide
our birth, to sit in remote judgment upon our deeds, to
record the secret fact of our salvation, or otherwise to
<earry into effect our fortunes in the other world — his

216 THE NEED OF GOD

existence must be a matter of conjecture. It is because
McTaggart thinks of the " works of God" in some such
way as this that it seems to him necessary to reason
around and away to them ; that he can balance so spec-
ulatively the chances that such a Being exists. It does
not occur to him that the metaphysical knowledge of
God might be empirical, i.e., based on his manifestation
in human concerns. Yet I venture to say that unless
God does operate within experience in an identifiable
manner, speculation will not find him, and may be aban-
doned. The need for metaphysical thought arises
(I venture the paradox) just because God is matter of
experience, because he works there and is known there
in his works. I must enlarge upon this assertion to
some extent.

If we consider the first out-croppings of the God-idea
in history, we do not find that men begin by connect-
ing God with unseen effects. He is the invisible cause
of very evident effects. Were it not for these effects, it
is difficult to think that the idea of an invisible cause
would have arisen. Men do not first imagine a God in
abstracto^ then speculate about his possible powers, and
then at last enquire whether such a Being exists. They
begin at the other end. They find their God (as James
puts it) in rebus. They are impressed by powers
which actually operate in Nature and society j they attrib-
ute to these powers substantial, that is metaphysical,
being. They learn in time that various powers can be
manifestations of a single power. They come to see that
in the struggle of powers among themselves, one power
must be supreme, and only one can be supreme. If they

THE NEED OF A GOD 21?

have called the several powers gods, they call the supreme
power God; and God is thereby defined in terms of the
interest which the human mind cannot but have in what-
ever power is supreme in man's own world. In such
a development of thought, there can be no place for an
enquiry whether God exists, or whether belief in him
has any importance : for the existence and importance
are the fixed points in the problem, — the uncertain ele-
ments being the fancies as to the nature of God's inner
being, his private life. Doubts must attach themselves
not to the question whether God is and works ; but to
the question what his works in reality are; what we shall
think of their tendency and quality ; what we can know
about the inner nature of that Being which we have iden-
tified simply as The Supreme Power.

Am I willing to accept the full consequences of the
position here taken, — namely, that if the personal and
moral aspect of supreme power has any worth, that as-
pect will be found in experience also ? I am willing.
But we shall have to search well in order to identify
such an experience.

Hi

The essential value of the personal attributes of the
Supreme Power is not to be found by those who simply
look forward. It is important to know what we may
expect ; it is important, as we were saying, to be able to
be hopeful. But for human nature much more than
good prospects are necessary to happiness. One must
be able to approve the world as it is ; one must even
be able to look backward without a shudder. "We
must provide for the safe-conduct of the excursions of

218 THE NEED OF GOD

the human mind, not alone for those of the actual
human being — such is the universality, or shall I say
generosity, of that side of our nature to which religion
appeals. We must find some worth in God that we
cannot find in the forward look of evolution.

Let me put the matter thus : we must be free to open
ourselves, wholly, in imagination and in fact if need be,
to the whole of human experience. If there is anything
which destiny may thrust upon us, or has thrust upon
others, and which we have to hide from or banish from
thought, we are not happy. If beasts must suffer to
supply my table, and I cannot open my mind to the
fact of their suffering, I cannot be unqualifiedly happy
at my table. If men have been tortured to establish
the civilization I enjoy, and I cannot face the reality of
their torture, I am not happy in my historical position.
If I can reconcile myself to the certainty of death only
by forgetting it, I am not happy. And if I can dis-
pose of the fact of human misery about me only by
shutting my thoughts as well as myself within my com-
fortable garden, I may assure myself that I am happy,
but I am not. There is a skeleton in the closet of the
universe ; and I may at any moment be in face of it.
Happiness is inseparable from confidence in action ; and
confidence of action is inseparable from what the school-
men called peace — that is, poise of mind with reference
to everything I may possibly encounter in the chances
of fortune.

Now this perfect openness to experience is not possi-
ble if pain is the last word of pain. Unless there is
something behind the fact of pain, some kind of mys-
tery or problem in it whose solution shows the pain to

THE NEED OF A GOD 219

be other than it pretends, there is no happiness for man
in this world or the next ; for no matter how fair the
world might in time become, the fact that it had been
as bad as it is would remain an unbanishable misery,
unbanishable by God or any other power. If we are
bound to be as fixedly final in our valuation of evil in
general as Mr. McTaggart is, taking it at its face value,
as pure bad and nothing more, then we must not only
accept his conclusion that the supreme power in this
world is of very mixed worth, such as only the continued
perpetration of mixed products can be expected from :
we must also accept such an imprisonment of thought
in its contemplation of the world and of destiny as must
ruin the peace of any out-living soul. The fact is, that
men have never taken their troubles that way: they
have always assumed that pain is to be explained. And
if this attitude is in any degree justified, important con-
sequences follow — namely, that no degree of evil what-
ever can constitute an absolute condemnation of life ;
for it would be always possible that further application
of the same solvent would transmute that evil also.
Whether a given evil can be understood "is a question
(to borrow McTaggart's language) which can never be
answered permanently in the negative while there is
still a future before us/' If this attitude is in any
degree justified, the whole groundwork of McTaggart's
argument is undone ; built as it is upon the dogma that
pain is incurably the last word of pain.

Now it can hardly be denied that the attitude in
question is in some degree justified. For it does not
occur to us that pain is not the last word of pain, apart
from experiences in which we actually discover pain

220 THE NEED OF GOD

changing its character. Do we not find simple past-
ness or remembrance changing the quality of ill for the
better? do we not find excitement doing it, love doing
it, wrath doing it? Early man probably knew these
strange transmuting experiences better than we do. He
knew how wounds in battle are scarcely felt. He knew
how rage could carry him gladly into certain injury.
He knew how pride could stop the sting of very torture.
And he knew how the frenzy of religious ecstasy made
mutilation not only endurable, but even necessary,
to give grist to the great exhilaration that stormed
within him. James notes "the remarkable fact that
sufferings and hardships do not as a rule abate the love
of life ; they seem on the contrary to give it a keener
zest." Inhabitants of Greenland and Labrador do not
leave their difficult countries, though they might ; and
seamen return to the hardships of the sea with an
unbreakable attachment which is no mere habit. There
exists then even widespread in human experience a justi-
fication for the assumption that pain has in some degree
a further account to meet; and if in some degree, then
possibly in all degrees. That complete openness to
experience, necessary for happiness, cannot be shown
impossible.

IV

Consider, now, by what means this occasional trans-
mutation of evil could become a certain command of all
possible evil — whereby an openness to all experience
might be possible. " All possible evil" is a large, unde-
fined, even growing and rapidly metamorphosing object.
What we should much like to find is a power which is,

THE NEED OF A GOD 221

not simply as a fact but in the nature of the case, neces-
sarily efficacious in this work of pain-transmuting, which
anticipates the nature of possible obstacles without
knowing them in detail. Where can such a principle
be looked for?

If a given power stays in the same field with other
powers and competes with them, its chances of subor-
dinating them are precarious ; its supremacy at any time
is a simple matter of fact, which may give place to another
matter of fact. But one power can obtain certain
supremacy in a field of power if it can in some way
get outside that field and survey it from above. Thus
man, as a physical force among forces animal and nat-
ural, has little chance with them; but as intelligence
he has some possibility of coping with the best that
nature canbring against him. There is competition also
among intelligences, among ideas; is there any possible
supreme power here? No intelligence can be sure of
success so long as it remains in the existing field, striving
simply for a more effective arrangement of old ideas;
but if it is able to reflect upon the whole idea-situation,
and from that reflection derive a new idea, all other
intelligences must become its dependents. It is the
same with competing passions. Anger pitted against
anger can never be sure of conquest: but a "soft an-
swer" enters the situation as a new idea. If it conquers,
it is because, refusing to compete, it includes and itself
stands outside the arena. Without further illustration,
may I suggest the principle that the supreme power in
every case is a non-competing power, one which may
seem at first glance even irrelevant to the point at
issue. Not otherwise will it be with any principle which

222 THE NEED OF GOD

can give us assured mastery of those obstacles collect-
ively named "evil."

In the cases above mentioned, in which we can see a
transmuting principle at work, let me call to mind the
prominence of association. That pain which is taken
in common, like effort which is carried on in common, is
found through the association to lose its harshness.1
One does not quite see why misery loves company, per-
haps; but no doubt the fact of association does some*
thing to change the color of the experience. There is
only one situation in savage life when pain seems wholly
unendurable: namely, when vanquished, dishonored, and
abandoned, the wretch must gasp out his life in utter sol-
itude. Hardship gives zest, but under what conditions
in particular? Chiefly, under conditions of significant
association. The general condition for the transmut-
ing of hardship seems to be this: that the sense of union
with something not-myself, which I judge worthy of
this very hardship, and which somehow demands it for
adequate expression, shall be dense and compacted in the
moments of suffering. This is naturally the case in the
moments of war and excitement, and it must have gone
far to make history less painful than the reading of its
literal pages in cold blood makes manifest. The laws
of the multiplication of human power by association
have never been worked out; but no one has failed to
measure in frequent experiences what incredible enhance*
ment of the value of any experience may occur in a
single touch of endorsement from without. Worth of all
sorts begins to acquire another dimension as it enters a

1 Even remembrance is a kind of social relation between my present
and my former self.

THE NEED OF A GOD 223

career of actual universality, such as the merest nod of
assent from an Other may convey. Association is a prin-
ciple which stands outside of and includes whatever may
become content of individual experience; there is some
possibility that in association a sufficient mastery of evil
may be found.

But unfortunately, association has its own evils*
Human companionship can, in the way we have noted, do
much to transmute every other kind of pain into some-
thing else; it cannot transmute its own kind of pain,
that which comes from its own defects. As imperfect
knowers of themselves and of each other, fellow-men are
the source of the severest evils we men have to endure;
and by virtue of our precarious hold on human existence
the closest association may cause the bitterest pang,
because its loss removes also that by which any loss is
made less grievous. Far, indeed, must we be from per-
fect openness to experience if there is not some power
over these evils also.

From what we have judged of supreme power, it
would follow that only something outside the field of
human association, not competing there, could afford
sufficient armoring against these greatest evils. It
must be another than any finite self, something which
reflects upon and in its reflection includes all finite
selves and their circumstances, something, nevertheless,
with which any finite self may become associated in
some infallible manner. This seems to me the point
in which a God becomes necessary. In God we have
the notion of an Other-than-all-men., and an Other

224 THE NEED OF GOD

whose relation to me is not subject to evil through its
own defect; one from whom therefore I can anticipate
no pain that must refer me to still another for its trans-
muting. It is not the power of God, as mighty in
comparison with other forces in their own fields, that
is of value to us; it is not God as miracle-worker,
tumbling Nature-masses about through Herculean or
Jovian command of energy ; it is not even God as vin-
dicator, doer of particular justice, meeting and over-
coming the inequities of men's judgments by a more
penetrating judgment; it is rather God as intimate,
infallible associate, present in all experience as That
by Which I too may firmly conceive that experience
from the outside. It is God in this personal relation
(not exclusive of the others) that alone is capable of
establishing human peace of mind, and thereby human
happiness. Something paradoxical about the Supreme
Power there is ; something in this non-competitive char-
acter which thinkers early seized upon: — as Lao Tze
glorifies the Tao that never asserts itself, as Christianity
presents for adoration its God in the guise of an in-
fant, and infant of the humblest. The authentic voice
of God, if it is to come to man with a wholly irresist-
ible might of meaning, must be a still, small voice.

It is scarcely open to question that the deepest asser-
tion of the religious consciousness is of its experience
of precisely such relation to its supreme Other. Just
such companionship we seemed to see the human will
spontaneously creating for itself, in its early resentful
outcry against destiny; to find later, perhaps, that
here was rather a discovery than a creation, strangely
relieving the pressure of its initial burden. Just such

THE NEED OF A GOD 225

companionsliip we find the developed religious con-
sciousness celebrating as the source of its "victory
over the world." Further than this it is not my func-
tion here to demonstrate the validity of these alleged
experiences. The problem of God's reality, in its
metaphysical setting, will occupy us in the pages imme-
diately following. We have shown that such God as
theism presents to men is necessary to their happiness^
and we have shown that such a God must be found in
experience, if at all.

It will not be amiss to emphasize in conclusion the
entire justice of MeTaggart's contention that the finite
God is of no worth. When we talk of experience of
God and companionship with God, we run a danger
hardly less seductive than the danger from atheism.
Indeed, atheism may be said to live on the perils and
failures of theism. The experience and companionship
of God are not a substitute for relations with humanity.
The guidance and encouragement of God, devotion
and love toward him, are false when they appear as
competitors in the field of human alliances. If we
have been near the truth in our description of the
immediate work of God, it can only be to render the
individual more perfectly open to experience, human
and other. If the experience of God does not, on the
whole, enhance the attachments of human life, one
must judge on these principles that the experience is
not of God. What these terms of human association
can mean when applied to God is the most difficult of
practical as well as of theoretical problems ; tending, pre-
sumably, to a mystical interpretation of worship. The

226 THE NEED OF GOD

personality of God must be, we think, personality whose
bonds are broken in " passing through infinity " ; deny-
ing this infinity, McTaggart finds rightly that he must
reject the rest as comparatively useless ; finds that his
finite God becomes an intruder, and an obstacle to the
loyalties of the spirit. The balance between the denial
of God and the right perception of God is most deli-
cate, and difficult to maintain. We shall not find it
until we have realized what Kant meant by the " regu-
lative idea." But the positive appreciation of what God
means to men is the first step toward finding that bal-
ance ; and further, " all things good are as difficult as
they are rare."

PAET IV
HOW MEN KNOW GOI>

CHAPTEE XVI

THE ORIGINAL SOURCES OF THE KNOWLEDGE
OF GOD

GOD is to be known in experience if at all : to this
result both of the preceding parts of our study
have led. And now we have to interrogate experience,
in the hope of a categorical answer whether the reality
which here we encounter in experience is in any literal
sense a living and divine reality, directly knowable as
such.

The habit of receiving our ideas about God through
tradition is likely to grow at the expense of any original
sources of this knowledge which we may possess. We
more readily believe that " God spake in times past unto
the fathers by the prophets " than that we have any
natural human organ for recognizing that presence.
But it must be a postulate of our own study that in
whatever way God has been known and heard by any
of the prophets, or by seers of more ancient date, or by
the first remote God-discerning mind in this planet's
unrecorded history, in fundamentally that same manner
is God known by all God-knowing men at all times.
The habit of looking backward to older origins, for
revelation authoritatively transmitted, is just and right:
because the knowledge of God is capable of develop-
ment, and no man could wish to begin again at zero.
But that by which he is able to recognize and accept

230 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

his authorities is his own knowledge of God, especially
tliat more elementary sense of his that a God exists, and
has left his word in the world. It is of this universal
and primordial knowledge that we wish to take posses-
sion ; far simpler and less wealthy than the contents of
" revelation," but for that reason the more apt to be
neglected, and thereby the means lost by which alone
revelation and tradition can be either appreciated or
criticised. We shall be satisfied at present if we can
find and verify those original sources of the knowledge
of God which we have in common with all men at all
times, the universal revelation. And it is fair to sur-
mise that these original sources, advanced in God-knowl-
edge as we may be, remain sources of new knowledge
also, inexhaustible, neglected at peril.

To judge from the history of religions, God has been
known for the most part in connection with other
objects ; not so much separately, if ever separately, as in
relation to things and events which have served as media
or as mediators for the divine presence. We find the
early knowers of God worshipping him under the guise
of sun, moon, and stars ; of earth and heaven ; of spirits
and ancestors; of totems, of heroes, of priest-kings; and
of the prophets themselves. Speaking broadly, there
are two distinct phases of experience wherein God is
apt to appear: in the experience of Nature and in social
experience. Not everywhere in Nature, but at special
points, well-known and numerous enough, the aware-
ness of God seems, as it were, to have broken through,
or to have supervened upon our ordinary physical
experience of those objects. When man has acquired so
much imagination that he is capable of being stirred

THE ORIGINAL SOURCES 231

by Nature, he seems capable at the same time of some-
thing more than imaginative stirring — namely, of
superstition, of religion. If that element of the man
is present which we call the sense of mystery, then the
apparitions of heaven begin to work upon it, and to
co-operate with it ; the infinitudes of space and time
are teeming with presentiment and omen ; and man's
nature-world is on its way to be judged divine.

So of social experience : it is not everywhere, but at
special junctures and crises, that the awareness of God
has come to men ; at the events of death and birth, of
war and wedlock, of dream and disease and apparition.
Given the imagination, the sense of mystery, and withal
so much self-consciousness as is required to make the
idea of soul, or double, or shadowy spiritual counter-
part; and these crises of social experience become clothed
with a significance not limited to this visible context :
the unseen world becomes peopled with spirits, and in
time, with gods. Spirit-worship and ancestors-worship
develop side by side with the greater and lesser nature-
worship, as if here also man had found access to a
knowledge of God.

But although we have here two different regions of
religious suggestion, destined to great historic careers
in relative independence, it is evident that in looking
for original sources we cannot keep them apart nor
assign to either a priority over the other. For the reli-
gious experience of Nature means nothing if not finding
Nature living, even personal, thereby socializing that
experience. Whereas the religious meaning of social
experience arises in the first place only as birth, death,
and the like are regarded as the work of that same

232 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

inexorable power displayed in Nature; and survival
theories become religious only in so far as the surviving
spirit becomes a power in Nature. What is the Fung
Shui of Chinese family religion but the collective ances-
tral Force, bearing on family fortune through the nature-
powers of wind and rain — in effect a family Yang
and Yin, even Tien and Tao. What would the Hindu
Sraddha be without its nature myth ? In all early reli-
gions the dead are thought to pass into Nature, and
in that passage to change their character, taking on the
menacing aspect of nature-powers, requiring therefore
to be propitiated no matter how nearly allied in life.
Further the unity that belongs in kind to the religious
objects, and must become theirs in form also, is chiefly
conferred upon them by the god of Nature. Spirits
are essentially pluralistic and swarming: at death, losing
much in individuality, souls were thought to mix with
nature and the winds in floating multitudes, or to hud-
dle in dismal nether-world societies, without hierarchy
of form or purpose. But heaven and earth and sun
have a natural universality and unity ; are fitted to give
shape and character to the plastic spirit-mass; and at
last to lift that mass into their own singleness of order
and power.1 Social experience, then, becomes religious
experience only when it is at the same time an experi-
ence of Nature power. And nature experience like-

1 Thus the conquest of Egypt under the banner of Horns, god of the
rising sun, prepared the way for such monotheism as Egypt approached,
and even for a moment attained. The focussing and defining influence
of nature in the religions of Persia, Greece, India needs hardly be pointed
out. In the Hebrew religion, indeed, the progress to monotheism was
of another sort ; but in this religion the imaginative elements are little in
evidence, whether on the side of nature or of social experience.

THE ORIGINAL SOURCES 233

wise is religious only when Nature becomes an object
of social apprehension. Spiritism and Animism are at
bottom the same.

Such experience of Nature as arouses a fear with
supersensible reverberations, suggestions of unseen pres-
ences;1 such social experience of human crises as
arouses an awe, likewise reaching into the supersensible,
an awe having close kinship with that Nature-fear: it is
such experience as this (not wholly unknown to any age
or to any man) that is called religious, and that brings
us close to the original source of religious knowledge.
But it is clear to us that this experience is not the
original source itself. In these distinctive religious
feelings of fear and awe we have already recognized the
operation of idea-masses prepared beforehand in some
more elemental experience j some vast and intangible
idea-mass probably, which man tries to give shape to, but
most miserably fails to express, in his language about the
" spirits." As small sounds in the night convey mighty
meanings, and feelings therewith, to minds well-stocked
with images of the weird and sinister; so if the phe-
nomena of experience, trifling as well as majestic, call
forth startled reactions, it is because man has already
begun to consider and judge the Whole. Neither men
nor children are able to fear the dark until they have
made much progress in intelligence and imagination.
In that " sense of mystery," which we thought must
first be present, we may see the idea of God already at

1 For a most skilful differentiation of this peculiar fear from other
types of fear, see F. B. Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion,
ch. "viiL

234: HOW MEN KNOW GOD

work. The original source is here, if we can discern it.
God has come upon man's world-scene in quiet ; and
man's terror results when in some use of his whole-idea
he suddenly notes God standing there. Through no
historical re-tracings shall we discover the silent entrance
into Nature of that presence. But what external evi-
dence may refuse, some analysis may yet afford us a
glimpse of.

In all experience of the type considered, we have
found man vividly conscious of his own limitations.
And all man's limitations, whether of knowledge or of
power or of worth, are brought home to him by his con-
tact with Nature in some form or other. Nature con-
centrates within itself all that is menacing and hostile
to man ; and also all that reminds him of his pettiness
and weakness. Primary religious experience is so bur-
dened with this consciousness of limitation that we may
almost say : What man fears, that he worships.

But we may notice that what he both fears and wor-
ships is always something more than the World which
limits him. His religion has added to the natural ter-
rors of existence new terrors of its own. Whatever his
fundamental religious experience is, it has brought him
little consolation. He goes about in a subjection to his
world which he had not before known ; a breach has
opened between him and his reality, — as if now it
belongs to a stranger, whereas before it was, if brute
fact, still his fact. The redskin, says Brinton, is
oppressed by the sense of something invisible at work
everywhere about him ; a sense which leaves him anx-
ious, full of alarms. And further, every touch of super-
nature is at the same time in some degree a sudden

THE ORIGINAL SOURCES 235

stroke of accusing self-consciousness. Among the
Bechuana people, when it thunders they exclaim, " i
have not stolen, I have not stolen ; who among us has
devoured the goods of another?" In first judging his
world, man seems to find his world judging him ; and
every experience of the divine is a day of judgment,
a moment summoning to instant, summary review of
self — which review seems from the first to have yielded
little of reassuring nature*

Now the epitome of all man's limitations is his igno-
rance \ and it is fair to presume that man's speculative
troubles are the secret of all these more practical troubles.
For the idea is (biologically) the scout of experience,
and doubtless a knowledge of dependence has touched
the soul in advance of any full appreciation of what
that dependence implies. The knowledge of ignorance
may well be the first warning note, sending its premoni-
tory shudder through the frame of human values. The
sense of a limitation of knowledge, even in Paradise,
might tempt man to explore his boundaries ; might make
him desire "to be as the gods, knowing good and
evil." He realizes that his knowledge is his great
weapon and defence, standing between him and fate?
he soon chafes at the persistence of any region of igno-
rance ; early proceeds to fill any such void of knowledge
with creatures of assumed-knowledge — even long before
he sees definitely how his ignorance is to hurt him.
Nothing could have been better timed than the appeal
of the serpent in the Garden.

But the knowledge of ignorance is of itself no reli-
gious experience. Beligion is bound up in the differ-
ence between the sense of ignorance and the sense of

236 HOW MEN OTOW GOD

mystery : the former means, " I know not " ; the latter
means "I know not; but it is Taiown" And I dare
say that man first realizes his ignorance only in so far
as he becomes conscious of mystery ; the negative side
of his experience is made possible by some prior recog-
nition of a positive being, on the other side of his
limitation.

It seems to me then, that the original source of
the knowledge of God is an experience which might
be described as an experience of not being alone
in knowing the world, and especially the world of
Nature. In such an experience, if there be such, would
be contained all the possibilities for harm and for good
which religion has exhibited.

So long as the unknown of the world is simple mys-
tery, a mere "It is known," man is made more a
servant than before by his religious experience. His
worship will take on depressing and violent aspects;
his consciousness will become a perpetual celebration
of his own inferiority. He will become a devotee of
the fearful and the immense, which have always for
their own sake an inherent fascination for man ; a fas-
cination which we understand when we consider how
the operation of any whole-idea is a creation of value.
It is psychologically impossible for man to face the
infinite in any shape without exultation. Any posi-
tive view of the universe beyond my ignorance has
power to excite infinite devotion ; not failing to tempt
the spirit to an infinite disloyalty to itself. Hence in
all ages of the world, the mere sense of mystery, as the
discerning of something beyond the bounds of ignorance,

THE ORIGINAL SOURCES 237

has claimed its victims ; there are always those who
are capable of throwing themselves beneath the wheels
of a cosmic Juggernaut, finding in pure abandonment
to the infinite if not a cure for human trouble, at
least an anaesthesia for all ills. And indeed, no man
has found his religion until he has found that for
which he must sell his goods and his life; the enthu-
siasm for martyrdom, for radical self-sacrifice, is the
work of the idea in all of us : and a universe of mys-
tery, though it can afford no more, can at least afford
opportunity for this.

But if that original experience of the presence of
God in the world can reach to some permanent hold on
its object, so that it might be expressed, " / know not ;
"but He knows" the entire aspect of religion is altered.
The reconciliation of men with such a world is no
longer degrading nor disloyal; for the breach which is
opened up between man and his world by the entrance
of the unseen Claimant, may be through that same
presence completely closed.

From the knowledge that "He knows" will be in-
ferred the thesis that the unknown of Nature is
knowable: and the endless task of science will receive
its necessary and sufficient warrant and encouragement.
Religion offers science the power and the stimulus to
proceed ad infinitum without fear of ultimate obstacle.
That this proud liberty has been no meaningless gift,
the beginnings of science may clearly show. For man's
first science is magic — his first systematic assertion
that nature is subordinate to the spirit; man's first
inductions are the magical inductions of the Name, the
Symbol, the Imitation. By his knowledge of God he

238 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

knows that there is nothing in the world that will
prove wholly refractory to the work of idea-making;
his knowledge of the absolute Knower is an attain-
ment, though a vicarious attainment, of the end of
scientific effort.

And so with whatever other and more concrete
consciousness of limitation may be incident to natural
or social experience: if that by which one knows
his limit is a positive knowledge of the Spirit, then
it is a success of incalculable importance. "I can-
not, but He can" lifts man over his first formidable
obstacles, and sets him on his feet as man, endowed as
a race with infinite faith and with infinite patience,
because already tasting the cup of ultimate achievement.
Such knowledge of ignorance, and the fear of the Lord
therewith, is the beginning of wisdom ; such knowledge
of impotence, the beginning of concrete mastery; such
knowledge of unholiness is already a touch of the
untouchable and a beginning of holiness.

Religion is often described as the healing of an
alienation which has opened between man and his
world: this is true; but we may not forget that it
is religion which has brought about that alienation.
Religion is the healing of a breach which religion
itself has made: and if we would reach the original
sources, we must find them in man's awareness of an
Other than himself, an Other who may be a companion,
but also an enemy more deadly than death, more dread-
ful than Nature in herself has any image of. It is
religion that reveals to man the disparity between him-
self and his world, sets him at odds with that from

THE ORIGINAL SOURCES 239

which he came, brings him to that pass to which the
animal cannot come — an unwillingness to take his
world as he finds it, a consciousness of the everlasting
No, and a defiance of it or perhaps a subservience to it,
— as if this were his god. And what man has to learn
by difficult degrees is, that it is his original knowledge
of God that has made this alienation possible. " Thou
couldst not seek me (nor fear me, nor be resentful
toward me) hadst thou not already found me": this
is what religion always knows, yet has forever to re-
learn.1

This primordial knowledge of God has never been
wholly obscured; some sign of that known compan-
ionship has never been absent from religion. Man
records this consciousness not only in tradition, but
also in act and token ; he sets up his holy places and
their strange appurtenances as memorials that the Spirit
has here been met on friendly footing, and may prob-
ably be met again. He carries with him, inseparable
from his person, his fetich, material medium for his
spiritual attendant and confidante, loss of which may be
loss of all that makes life worth living.

At the source of all religion, so far as our analysis
can discover, we find an experience of God as an Other
Knower of our World, already in close relation to self,

1 It is reserved for fully developed religion to read truly the para-
doxical history of man's religious experience, both in the race and in the
individual. Are not these lines of George Herbert true of these early
racial gropings also ?

Lord, Thou didst make me, yet Thou roundest me ;
Lord, Thou dost wound me, yet Thou dost relieve me ;
Lord, Thou relievest, yet I die by Thee ;
Lord, Thou dost Mil me, yet Thou dost reprieve me*
I cannot skill of these Thy wayw.

240 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

and also in some natural bond with our social and phys-
ical experience. Such is the report of the elementary
religious consciousness; it is this report that we have
now to pass judgment upon.

CHAPTEE XVII

THE KNOWLEDGE OF OTHER MINDS THAN OUR

OWN

OUR enquiry into the knowledge o£ God has led to
this as the central issue : whether in the midst of
experiences o£ Nature and of human extremity, using
these in some way as mediators, there can be a veritable
experience of infinite Spirit other than myself. We do
not mitigate the difficulty of this question by pointing
out that the knowledge of any other minds than our
own, even in plain human intercourse, has its difficulties
also. But in so far as the difficulties are similar, it will
be an advantage to bring them together, — the more so
since, in spite of any difficulties of theory, we believe
our experiences of our fellow's minds to be real, —
neither illusory nor simply workings-hypotheses.

All the (substantive) objects of human attention and
experience may be put into three fundamental classes :
the physical objects, which with their relations we sum
up as Nature ; the psychical objects, which with their
relations we sum up as Self ; and the social objects, or
other minds, which with their relations we sum up as
Society, or still more comprehensively, as our Spiritual
World, ourselves being included. These classes of
objects seem clearly distinguishable; not mixing nor
blending at their borders — when I mean another mind

243 HOW MEN KXOW GOD

I distinctly do not mean either my own mind or a phys-
ical thing. Each has its own science — physics, etc.,
psychology, sociology. And each has its own organ of
perception.

But no. We have an outer sense, says Locke, for
things of nature ; we have an inner sense for things of
our own minds, our thoughts and feelings; but Locke
mentions no sense by which we can discern another
mind. And neither, be it said, does any later philos-
opher. Sociologists speak of " the social sense/7 social
instincts, " consciousness of kind," and the like ; but
these practical designations are not intended to name
an actual organ of knowledge differentiated for percep-
tion of other minds. We have no such organ. Soci-
ology is an extended psychology, made possible by the
fact that Society, as we noted, includes Self, — is built
up really of psychical objects, and from the center out-
ward, by help of ideas which work well in practice:
other theory than this of social experience we shall not
find in the Books. This third class of objects is, by
some strange device, made knowable without a special
perceptive organ: — or, perhaps we are mistaken in
assuming it literally knowable.

This absence of a perceptive organ makes it probable
that we are mistaken : it suggests that our social knowl-
edge is built on hypothesis, and not at all on experi-
ence. It compels us to examine our so-called social
experience directly, to see whether we can find any point
of actually present and certain knowledge of another
mind. Such an examination yields little that is satisfy-
ing. What I do directly experience is the physical
presence of the other person ; and his expressive signs

KNOWLEDGE OF OTHER MMDS 243

and language, which are also physical. From these I
infer his reality, and nothing in experience tends to
shake that hypothesis; everything confirms it. What I
have, then, is a perfect hypothesis. For all practical
purposes, I am as certain of my social environment as I
am of my physical environment : indeed, the reality of
this social world of mine is the last thing I should
doubt. The practical certainties here are unshakable.
But if you ask for more than practical certainty ; if you
require a genuine social experience, in the literal sense
of the word experience, I am at a loss to discover it. I
am inclined to think there is no such thing.

And I must acknowledge that even this sense of
practical certainty does sometimes desert me. My social
consciousness is subject to extraordinary fluctuations;
my sense of the presence of other souls comes and goes
in an unaccountable way; it flits in its substantiality
from one extreme to the other, much as does my belief
in G-od. When I seek to grasp it, it eludes me.

There are times when my consciousness is burden-
somely public, and not my own ; when the social world
is all too real and immediate ; when I can find no
seclusion in my thoughts, no privacy even behind
barred doors. At such times, I can get no hold on
myself, because of the incessant pressure of the other
men in me, voices, postures, beliefs that pursue me and
harry away all risings of individuality on the part of
my self. I escape into the wilderness, and Nature
becomes a chorus — there is no shape which may not
take on animation — even the stones may sermonize.
And yet at other times, if I deliberately seek contact
with that world of other mind, an oppressive solitude

244 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

cloaks me in. I bury myself in the rush of men ; but
am no better able to bridge chasms, or reach vitality of
give-and-take with them. I make designs against my
neighbor, I hunt him to his secret castle, I hold him at
the point of my sword, I seize him bodily — he vanishes,
and I have nothing. I cannot make him open himself
to me ; I cannot so much as open myself to him : I am a
prisoner, and without ability to find where I am bound.
I see that the doctrine of monads is no futile myth.

Such is my current social experience so-called, and
it seems clear to me that if there were any absolute
certainty in it, these variations would not occur. That
which at times may so escape me can hardly be an
empirically given presence.

Then I reflect that in the nature of the case it could
hardly be otherwise : the other mind must be beyond
my powers of direct experience. It can be no object of
sensation, because it is not a physical thing. It must
be such as I am, a thinker of its objects, not an object
among objects ; and as such thinker, or subject, it can
only be thought, not sensed. That which makes him
himself, and other-than-me, is (by definition) the fact
that his thoughts are not my thoughts ; so long as he
remains other-than-me, his thoughts can never become
identically mine, though I may conjecture them and
approximately think them after him. Of myself, I
find, and desire, an infinite thought-fund inaccessible
to others, and inaccessible through all finite times to
myself ; it cannot be otherwise with him — he has in
him an infinitude of character, only gradually devel-
oped and made general — infinitude at which I may

KNOWLEDGE OF OTHER MINDS 245

only guess. Souls, by their own nature, cannot touch
each other ; cannot experience each other : their rela-
tions do not rise to the point of knowledge, — they
remain excursions, adventures, hypotheses, wonderfully
sustained by their results, but none the less, launches
from solitude in the direction of an assumed reality j
which reality, if it exists, is no less solitary.

I look down from a cliff upon a beach below; the
black fleck wandering there excites in me the con-
sciousness of fellow-being: I turn away with the
impression that there has been in my life a social event,
an experience of another mind. But I have verified
nothing. And if I climb down and discover that
object to be in fact a human shape, what have I now
verified ? A physical object, — nothing more. What
made that glance from above more than physically sig-
nificant was clearly a contribution from within. In
Kantian phrase, I had imposed this concept upon the
appearance ; I had begriffen it that way, and my own
Begriff gave me the only sociality I experienced, — all
that in fact I ever can experience.

There are more intimate relations, and less intimate
relations : more work, or less, for my Begriff-social to
do — but what my Begriff is given to work upon, as
actual stuff of experience, is the body. Body of man
and Nature — nothing more. When that body disap-
pears, even though the other spirit persists, all that /
have of him is gone. I have no organ for the experi-
ence of other mind; by the nature of other-mind, I
could have none.

I would press the logic of this situation, if I were
able, until we should cry out that it is a lie, whether or

246 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

not we see how it is false; and that any philosophy
which ends in such a situation is impossible. Human
communications must be at bottom as real as we think
them to be — no intricate, successful, solitary panto-
mime of each with himself and Body.

And then I would urge that we are not quit of this
logic by crying out against it ; and resolving for our
part to treat our world as if we were in direct conscious
relations with our fellows. For that attitude of common-
sense-resolve is precisely the subjective, solipsistic sort of
philosophy which we have just denounced. Logic here
is the sole remaining bond of genuine mutuality among
men ; and if we will not patiently earn our conscious
right to our fellows, we must likewise forgo our con-
scious right to God. We cannot dispense with either.

The problem of our social consciousness is as old as
Berkeley's idealism (old in fact as Leibniz or Descartes,
but not felt before Berkeley as a primary demand on
thinking) ; and since his time thinkers have not been
allowed to forget it. It has become a stock spectre,
especially for idealistic theories, to show that their logic
must end in solipsism. Several ways to escape the logic
of separate personality have been devised. We shall
examine the most important of them*

One may seek to discover and formulate infallible
criteria or signs, by which we may certainly know that
we have before us another conscious being. This way
out has its plausibility ; for is it not the sight of other
bodies and expressive movements like or analogous to
our own which actually compels our judgment that
another mind is here ? Or, if we learn (as from Boyce

KNOWLEDGE OF OTHER MINDS 247

and Baldwin) that we rather interpret our own bodies
by those of others, than the reverse ; and if we find (by
first steps in comparative psychology) that analogies
soon fail as we try to test the consciousness of animals
and plants ; if we abandon, as we must, the whole argu-
ment from analogy as hopeless, certainly the psychology
of our impulsive social reactions will reveal some reliable
stimuli, whose presence infallibly indicates other mind.
Are there not as Wundt suggests "manifestations of
animal life which cannot be explained without the intro-
duction of the mental factor? " Unfortunately there
are none such; every physical change must and may
be referred to a physical cause. There is no reason
why "educability" itself may not be a property of
matter.1 Are there not in certain groupings of actions
unmistakable " signs of choice " ; or as James better
states it, can we not recognize " the pursuit of ends
with the choice of means ? " Certainly all such signs
as these do guide our social judgments. Even more
than by strict planfulness (" pursuit of ends with
choice of means ") are we guided by a certain playful-
ness or superabundance in the apparent government of
movements: signs of fluidity, eagerness, emotionality
are more immediately compelling than signs of intelli-
gent end-seeking. But after all, these are nothing but
signs, physical signs ; and explicit language which rises
out of this aboriginal expressiveness is but a further
set of physical signs, which nowhere rests on a verit-
able experience of other mind. If somewhere we could
begin with an actual consciousness of the social object,

1 And herewith we exclude Binet, Bunge, Moebios, etc., as well as
Schneider who appeals to "irregular muscular action."

248 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

all these criteria would help us amazingly to continue
and subdivide our intercourse: it is always easier to
determine what state of mind belongs with what set of
actions than to determine whether there be any state of
mind there or no. (Writhings of earthworm on fish-
hook express discomfort, if they express any conscious-
ness at all, which may be doubted.) Even if infallible
criteria could be got — which is impossible — they
would still do nothing to bring us nearer the other mind
itself : for all such criteria are themselves physical.

A much more adequate way is that proposed by
Professor Eoyce ; his criteria are not physical, and do
undoubtedly bring us near to an original experience of
the other mind. " Our fellows are known to be real "
says Royce, " because they are for each of us the end-
less treasury of more ideas. . . . (They) furnish us with
the constantly needed supplement to our own fragment-
ary meanings." l To anything that appears in our life
with the character of a response, we instinctively attrib-
ute outer personality. Not thunder in general, but
thunder at a critical moment in our thinking, means
that Jove has spoken. If a distant signal moves in
direct answer to our own signalings, we need see no
human form to infer the presence of an outer conscious-
ness. What infallibly convinces us is the experience
that our own thought is carried on to further develop-
ment (and without our own equivalent effort). The
more completely and deeply the answering and supple-
menting idea caps and enters into our own train of
development, the more inevitable the acknowledgment*
And so we may build a series all the way from the

1 The World and the Individual, ii, 168-174.

KNOWLEDGE OF OTHER MINDS 249

opportune clap of thunder to the continuous successful
intercourse with our fellow men, a series of increasing
conviction of the reality of our social experience. Whei N
we have reached the stage of voluntarily putting ques
tions to our environment, and expecting and receiv
ing conceptual answers, our faith is complete. God is
doubtless most real to that person who finds his prayers
somehow responded to; for, to paraphrase Royee's cri-
terion, response is our best ground for believing the
social object real.

Upon this way of reaching the Other Mind, we must
make the following comment. That we are still left
with only an inference of that Other; a faith and not a
knowledge in experience. Even though we say, with
Royce, that reality is nothing else than response (or ful-
filling of meaning), we have not so far as this criterion
goes, found that reality personal save by probability of
high order. We can still speak only of u the source
of our belief in the reality of our fellow men," 1 not of
an experience of that reality itself. The relative pas-
sivity of our reception of idea from without is no invin-
cible proof that it does come from another mind : men
have been known to dream conversations which add to
their knowledge ; thinking itself often takes conversa-
tional shape, ourself being recipient ; in all thinking the
new comes to one as if from another. We shall have
a difficult distinction to make between such inner
development of our own meanings, and that development
which we shall regard as hailing from a veritable Other
Mind. But no type of inference, however direct and
simple, can quite meet our requirement ; for that which

1 P. 169 of work cited ; italics mine.

250 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

we must first infer is one step away from immediate
experience.

Are we not driven, then, to a view whicli closely
resembles that first supposition of ours that social expe-
rience is a, practical certainty : that view namely which
interprets the social experience as a moral affirmation, an
acknowledgment which we ought to make, something of
which no scientific or empirical knowledge is either pos-
sible or conceivable. As Professor Miinsterberg puts
it in his powerful chapter on "Die reine Erf ahrung," 1
— we do experience our fellow men, but even so as we
immediately experience all reality, by acknowledging
them real. I cannot doubt that the last mystery of
mutual contact is contained in the will, rather than in
the intellect ; a thesis which we shall have later to con-
sider.2 But all will makes use of knowledge, prior or
simultaneous. There is no human will that does not
contain a nucleus of knowledge which is not our own
act ; and it is this that we wish to separate out.

All of these ways — by physical criterion, by response,
and by acknowledgment — have a common presup-
position. They all suppose the mind to be furnished
in advance with an idea of an Other Mind. We are
able to read our signs as we do, because we already ex-
pect them to mean something, we have already framed
somehow the conception of another mind. Our world
responds only in so far as we have our net hung out,
confident that Other Mind will fill it with usable fur-
therings of our own thought: apart from this Other-
Mind-meaning of ours, no event could take on the

1 Grandziige der Psychologie, pp. 44-55.

* Under the general topic of « Mysticism," Part V.

KNOWLEDGE OF OTHER MINDS 251

character of response. So also, if we are to will, or
postulate, or acknowledge, the fellow-man, it is to be
asked how, apart from previous idea, we know what
to acknowledge. The conception of the fellow-man,
somehow obtained, is necessary before my duty of
acknowledging him can be performed, or understood.
Beside which, there remains an ulterior question, — to
Whom or to What do I owe this duty ? I am inclined
to think that obligation implies a known Other : and
that while duty and social experience are doubtless in-
separable, it is duty that depends on social experience,
not social experience on duty.

It is because all of these theories really accept the
doubt of an immediate experience of Other Mind, that
they must thus assume the idea of Other Mind to be
there, — innate or unaccounted-for. It is for this rea-
son that we cannot adopt any of them as final ; though
none of them fails to throw much important light on
the actual working of our social consciousness.

The ultimate difficulty in this matter is due, as I have
come to think, to our over-dogmatic ideals of knowl-
edge, and to the explanations we adopt of the knowing
process. We take our knowledge of physical things as
the type and ideal of all satisfactory knowledge, — and
we find naturally enough that we have no such physical
knowledge of fellow minds. We explain our knowing
of any object by a relation between object and subject,
in which the object presumably produces some effect on
the subject, — and we find naturally enough that any-
thing which is intrinsically subject cannot become such
an object.

252 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

But if such were the true ideal and explanation of
knowledge, we could not, of course, know ourselves
any more than we could know others. For we can have
no physical knowledge of our own mind, nor can our
own mind cease to be subject in order to become an
object. And conversely, by whatever understanding of
the matter we can account for self-knowledge, by that
same understanding we may probably account for knowl-
edge of other subjects.1 When Locke suggested his
inner sense, after the analogy of outer sense, he prob-
ably used a misleading figure; intending doubtless only
to outline the fact of self-knowledge as a thing distinct
from knowledge of physical sense : of special organ
there seems to be none for self-knowledge, any more
than for knowledge of other minds. In truth, all
three classes of objects of experience stand on the same
precarious footing: and of these three classes, the knowl-
edge of other mind is the latest to be declared impos-
sible. Each of the other types of knowledge, knowl-
edge of nature or of self, had been shown impossible,
by one theory of knowledge or another, before social
knowledge had been drawn into technical question.
We have only to adopt the proper axiom, and any group
of objects we please becomes subject to skepticism, thus:

I. Knowledge of self is impossible. Because the
thing known is always other than the self that knows it.

1 More technically stated : we err in assuming to explain knowing
by a dyadic relation between subject and object (say S : O), This explan-
ation bears its own condemnation on its face ; for if knowing were of the
form S : 0, S (in every act of knowing) would remain unknown, and the
relation S : O must be unknown likewise. If knowledge is to be explained,
that is, put in terms of something else than knowledge, our dyad must
broaden out, — as I think and shall try to show, — into a triad.

KNOWLEDGE OF OTHER MINDS 253

On this axiom it might be possible to know Nature, or to
know Other Selves, — only not the Self. The epistemo-
logical subject is unknown (Rickert). Psychological
introspection is understood to reveal, not the self, but
quasi-physical objects ; we find never the genuine self.

II. Knowledge of physical objects is impossible.
Because consciousness can contain nothing but experi-
ence-stuff. When I say of any object "I know it"; I
have already made it a part of my experience : when I
think of it, I think of it always as contained in experi-
ence,— if not my own, then another's. On this axiom, it
might be possible to know Self, or even Other Selves, —
only not physical things as independent substances . A
quasi-physical world of orderly experience we of course
have; we never find the genuine physical world.

UL Knowledge of social objects is impossible. This
is proved by sharpening either axiom above. We may
say that the object of knowledge is always other than
any subject. Or we may say that the object of knowl-
edge is always my object, belonging to my experience,
known as such, thought of as such. In either case
social experience is impossible. Quasi-social experience
one does not question ; it is only the genuine Other that
we fail to find.

I am inclined to think that the three cases are alike.
We have a trilemma, each horn of which is as valid as
the rest. We could set up another triad, if we chose,
beginning thus : Self is the one object perfectly know-
able ; Nature is the one object perfectly knowable ; the
Other Mind is the one object perfectly and ideally know-
able. The last of these propositions would be as ten-
able as the first, and as little tenable.

254 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

It is not useless, I think, thus to point out that all
types of knowledge are liable to the same type of predica-
ment; and that all such predicaments may be traced to
axioms expressing some ideal of knowledge too hastily
assumed as exclusive. There is a sense in which we can
know ourselves better than we can know any other thing,
whether of nature or of mind beyond ourselves. There
is a sense in which the physical world is more thor-
oughly knowable and satisfactorily holdable in knowl-
edge than any other type of object. There is also a
sense in which the primary object of acquaintance for
any finite knower is his environment of Other Mind*

The alienness and inaccessibility which we are com-
pelled to ascertain from time to time, not more in the
Other Mind than in Nature or in Self, may well be only
such alienness as we must intend them to have, meaning
what they do, if we were to picture to ourselves their
most ideal knowableness. May it not be, for example,
that if we should become clear what kind of knowledge
of Other Mind we should desire, as the most perfect pos-
sible knowledge of Other Mind, this ideal knowledge
would not differ in principle from the knowledge which
we actually have. I propose to try this as the next stage
in our search for the actual social experience ; enquiring
particularly whether we could desire to know Other Mind
apart from just such physical mesh as has in this present
chapter seemed the chief barrier to that knowledge.

CHAPTER XVm

SUCH KNOWLEDGE AS WE COULD DESIRE

WHAT is the object which we desire to know?
An other mind : but certainly in no case an
empty mind. It is a mind which has its own objects,
and is at work upon them. There is no principle of
attraction between empty minds, i.e., between minds,
pure and simple : there is no gravitation between minds
as between bodies.

Regarded as pure spirits, minds are very much alike j
individuality begins to appear, and our interest there-
with, only in so far as the mind engages in struggle
with its experience. In truth, minds must be occupied
with matter in order to be of interest to one another ;
whence it may appear that matter supplies the principle
of attraction between spirits, as well as between bodies
— the principle at once of attraction and separation.
Character comes out chiefly in dealing with Nature1
and what engages us in any person is an individual
quality which must be described in terms of his
encounter with physical conditions, and the encounter of
the race with those same conditions. Every character
is some epitome of the economic and artisan labors of
the race. Power over nature, clearly seen or dimly
divined in another, is what compels us to him. This
power is first seen in the body itself, wherein wayward

* See above, p. Ida

256 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

materials and energies are subdued under an immediate
capital command, prophetical of much further mastery j
and beauty of body signifies to us an ease of mastery,
•which finishing its task returns with abundance to con-
trol itself. Apart, then, from a world of things which
resists desire and so forms the text and context of a
temporal career, there is nothing in mind personal and
distinctive, exciting to knowledge. These elementary
strains and stresses make up our simplest thought of
the man. It is the other mind as knowing and master*
ing Nature that we first care about.

The mind to be known is, we say, a concrete being ;
worthless even to itself apart from the material in
which it operates. It is the Mind-in-union-with-Nature
that we want to know. But the mind is still that
which deals with this material; and we concern our-
selves with the material only for the sake of that which
it manifests. I make boots ; but still, it is no part of
my self that I make just boots — I could have found
my character as well in making books or laws or music.
Would it not be possible, if knowing were ideal, to
take the burden of nature-stuff for granted and see
that character in itself, becoming conscious of its think-
ing apart from the irrelevant stimuli of its thought ?

The notion of telepathic communication seems to
propose some such ideal ; that of reading thoughts
without taking cognizance of sensations. Since we are
speaking of ideals not of facts, and telepathy has
usually been regarded, whether by believers or by non-
believers, as an ideal improvement in mutual knowl-
edge, we must look into the meaning of its proposal.

KNOWLEDGE WE DESIRE 257

Telepathy would save, presumably, the trouble of expres-
sion ; it would save the detour of thought, by which
it must journey down into language and back into
thought again. It would connect the two termini
directly, without the complex series of irrelevant means.

Examine this proposal of telepathy. Consider our-
selves in the act of knowing the thought of another
mind in the direct manner suggested. This must mean
one of two things. Either we find ourselves imagin-
ing the other person, and in imagination hearing him
speak, or seeing him make well-known signs, or other-
wise reinvesting himself in fancy with his usual physi-
cal media of communication. Or else, we find our own
thoughts moving under some " strong impression " that
this development hails from a given absent person. In
either case, the value of the experience would lie in the
possibility of verifying it, by communicating with the
person " face to face." If such possibility of verifying
were cut off, we should speedily be disabused of our
preference for this sort of relation with our friends;
what more unsatisfactory intercourse could be imagined
than a series of "strong impressions" which had no
prior nor further history? Even to the telepathic
fancy, the physical presence and vocal evidence of the
other's thought remains the standard experience, to
which all other points as its ideal, however useful
(telephone-wise or wireless-wise) in exceptional circum-
stances. Telepathy, I think, has little to offer toward
defining a better way of knowing Other Mind.

The plausibility of the thought-reading ideal comes
in part from the very perfection of our ordinary modes
of intercourse ; through their silent efficiency the phys-

258 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

ical bearers of our meaning drop out of sight, and it
is to us as if we were dealing with meanings purely,
without any need of sights and sounds. Our social
experience is the pre-eminently developable side of
human experience: as we have perfected it, it is of
peculiar richness, elasticity, and depth. It is with some
effort of abstraction that we look away from those
regions where, with amazing technique, the play of our
passing thought-exchange takes place, to the simple
physical groundwork of it all. We think we might
dispense with that, only because it serves us so
perfectly.

There is another reason for the appeal of the pro-
posal that thoughts may be known without reference
to Nature. It is the assumption that men first have
thoughts and then later express them. This is less
than a half-truth ; for the expression of a thought is
an integral part of taking possession of that thought.
The one quickest way to put stupidity on a par with
genius would be to make stupidity owner of all these
ideas which it has, but is not yet able to express. In
truth, it is no hardship that friends must " descend
to meet" — as Emerson has it: for such descent into
physical expression is a progress into valid and active
existence.

An idea shares the history of the body ; it needs to
ripen and mature; it must find its way by gradual pro-
cesses to the surface, where it will show itself in lan-
guage and in action. Hastening this birth involves
loss of stamina and quality in the product. The
resistance of Nature to the expression of a thought is
not the resistance of a wholly hostile medium; deten-

KNOWLEDGE WE DESIEE 269

tion is a spiritual condition for health and viability, not
a physical condition solely. It seems fair to say that
the more significant the idea, the more it needs to be
lived with before it is uttered. Idea as well as Matter
must be "mixed with labor" before it can become
property. And perhaps also there are no ideas which
are mature at birth ; but they, like the young of higher
species, must pass a certain time in the open under
friendly protection, before they can pass current among
other ideas, the tools and properties of all men.

It thus requires time and Nature in order that a mind
shall exist ; must it not also require time and Nature in
order that a mind shall be known? "We do not wish to
know the mind other than as it is; we cannot wish to
know it, then, except in terms of its own traffic with
Nature, both in acting and in thinking ; in possessing
its own character, and in possessing its own ideas.

It is no accident, therefore, that we begin our
acquaintances with fellow-men at their periphery — at
the point of their visible encounter with Nature, with
weather and the common physical conditions of exist-
ence. It is indeed an accident (relatively speaking)
whether a man work out his special career in shoe^
leather or in medicine or in ink: it is no accident
whether he meet the four elements and make up
accounts with them. And however far acquaintance
progresses, we cannot omit from our concept of the man
those items, even trivial, of physical behavior into which
we learn to condense the significance of large vistas
of his spiritual quality, — the shrug, the still glance,
the nervous step, the grasp of the hand. And there is

260 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

some ground for thinking that we know no man com-
pletely until we have been with him in the wild, and
have shared with him some first hand measurement of
idea against the old elemental human obstacles.

But Nature has other properties beside obstinacy
that belong inseparably to the knowledge of souls.
"What we wish to know of a man is doubtless his Idea
(or, as Chesterton says, his philosophy), and therewith
himself: but we can know an idea only by knowing
whatever that idea contains and aims at. Contents,
we have considered : an idea is always an idea of some-
thing, and the all-available first something is physical
stuff, whatever else it may be. As for the aim of ideas,
we thought that all ideas aim at a lodgment in Sub-
stance,1 doubtless first seen behind Nature ; if so, no
man can be known without knowing that object. The
identity of personality, we thought, was bound up with
some changelessness in its ultimate object; and the
unity of personality in some unity to be found there in
the world beyond : 2 but I venture to say that unless
changelessness and unity were discoverable in some
character of physical experience, any other object would
work against great odds to maintain them. For reality
cannot detach itself from the experience of Nature:
sensation has some of the characters and dimensions of
reality not elsewhere found. Sensation lends to expe-
rience its pungency, its vividness, its particularity.
The definite separation of parts in Nature, the clear
difference between position and position in space — no
point confused with any other — make the world of
sense the place where all definiteness is set up, where

1 See above, p. 119. * See above, pp. 187.

KNOWLEDGE WE DESIRE 261

all desire for clarity and differentiation seeks its home.
If it is true, then, that we cannot know a definite idea
or being save as that being has a definite object ; that
we cannot know a vivid being, save as having a vivid
object; that we cannot individualize that being, save as
that being has objects with definite differences; that
we cannot measure or estimate any being, save as that
being has objects themselves measurable, quantitative :
— if this is true, we see that in ways affecting the very
foundations of personality, the knowledge of Nature,
of Nature pungent and intense with sensation, is an
integral part of the knowledge of another mind. These
values (vividness, etc.) of physical experience are not
like the corresponding values of social experience, —
they are, so far as they go, identical with social
values : they are properties of mind and matter at the
same time.

I do not say that knowing thus the objects of another
mind is equivalent to knowing that mind ; I say that
such knowledge of the objects is a necessary, an inte-
gral part of social consciousness, even of ideal social
consciousness.

It is not indeed sufficient to know the objects ; we
should have further to know those objects as being
known by the Other Mind ; we must find the idea at
work ; we must verify in experience our simplest defini-
tion of the Other Mind — an Other-knower-of-physical-
Nature. We want the center as well as the periphery ;
and Nature certainly cannot give the center of person-
ality, the idea itself. But Nature can give a symbol
of the center.

262 HOW ME2ST KNOW GOD

We have so far had little to say of the body with
which we so closely identify the Other Mind ; for this
identification is all-too-absorbing — we forget that our
knowledge of men comes as much from observing their
environment as from observing their bodies. But the
body is after all that with which Nature is handled ; as
the idea is that with which Nature is thought. The
body is a symbol of the idea : it stands as subject to
the environment as object. In its relation to its physi-
cal surroundings, it presents a physical picture of the
knowing-process.1 But the body is more than a symbol.

The body is an incredibly intricate and exact meta-
phor of every inner movement of that Other Mind. To
every shade of thought and motive, there corresponds
some change in the body, reflecting in its own different
sphere each type of variation to which the inner state
is subject. Man still " looketh on the outward appear-
ance " only, even though he were able to examine the
living brain ; but remarkable it is that there is nothing
in " the heart " not faithfully displayed in this appear-
ance, and at the moment of its occurrence.

With all our inability to gain the exact key to the
cipher; 3 and with all our inadequacy in observing these

1 And this picture is so significant that in our theories of knowledge,
we can hardly escape it. It is the inveterate source of that dualistic theory
of knowledge which we have condemned. We forget that We who thus
see the Other's knowing, in picture, from the outside, should be included
in the picture to give the whole truth, even in symbol.

a It is not inconceivable that the key might be accurately defined,
to some degree. Such a reading of the metaphor as that proposed by
Mnnsterberg, may offer a conception of a solution. Quality of sensation,
says Munsterberg, is represented in the brain by the place of excitation ;
intensity by energy of excitation; vividness by energy of discharge ; value-tone
by place of discharge. A somewhat different suggestion, differing espe-

KNOWLEDGE WE DESIRE 263

subtle physical changes; it remains true that the body,
i£ we will take it so, is little else than the soul made
visible. If we should say that the body has no inde-
pendent reality, but only exists as a bulletin of an inner
process; being but that process itself, reporting itself to
us in such terms as we can physically apprehend : — if
we should conceive of the body in this way, we should
hardly over-state the immediacy with which it presents
externally what the mind internally is, and not in its
passing phases alone, but in its most rooted habits, its
oldest memories, its most permanent wills and purposes.
The body is a complete metaphor of the idea.1

But, further, the body is more than a metaphor. In
some phases, it shows what that Other's experience liter-
ally is. Thus time is the same for both body and
mind; the time of the brain process is identical with the
time of the psychosis it represents. For us who look
on, the date of those processes — if we know what they
are — may be said to be a matter of direct experience, —
through the body. Also, from the position which the
body occupies in space, a particular and exclusive per-
spective view of the visible world is determined; and we

cially with regard to value-tone, will be found in an appended essay, page
546- but it will be seen from either that the work of key-finding is the main
concern of psycho-physics, — a science of definite standing, with legitimate
and infinite problem.

1 The body is the manifestation In spatial metaphor of the will-to-live
as inborn and as modified by experience and choice. I do not mean that this
metaphor can be read by simple inspection ; for in the body other records
are composed with the record of the will : the will of the world beyond,
as it attacks the inner will and impinges on it, leaves its trace here also.
The surface of the body is the shore-line where outgoing and incoming
purposes meet, conflict and cross ; and one tale confuses the clarity of the
other, — yet adds the data without which the other were less than true.

264 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

who look on, can through our own physical experience
know something of the spatial experience of that Other.
Moreover, as the place of that body alters from point
to point continuously, a like continuous change takes
place in the physical experience of that other; the two
continuities are identical, and we observe that con-
imtity. And this continuous history, which cannot be
iuplicated by any other mind, is taken together with its
view of the Changeless, to form the ground-work of
its individual identity, — of which, thus, through our
experience of that body, we get some literal glimpse.

It is for this reason that our conceptions of dis-
embodied spirit, or of an Other whose body we can-
not locate or imagine, tend to lose just these qualities
of individuality and particularity (as early survival theo-
ries and spiritism sufficiently show) ; we find ourselves
impelled to assign them deliberately a place or seat in
Nature, or else in some other nature accessible to us in
imagination, in order to save their personality from
obliteration before our minds. How little, then, from
our ideal of social experience can we dismiss the expe-
rience of body.

I trust I may be pardoned for dwelling thus long on
considerations that are familiar. I confess that this
extraordinary device by which the Other Mind presents
itself in the guise of a body in the midst of Nature
seems to me each time I think of it more wonderful
than before. The inseparable union of two things so
disparate as social experience and experience of Nature
seem to be: is there not a perpetual amazement in
this? It would be less amazing, perhaps, if it were all

KNOWLEDGE WE DESIRE 265

pure metaphor, or symbol, or the mere outside of what
is within; but we have noted points at which the mate-
rial world, as we call it, ceases to be a metaphor and
shows us, as it were, a literal edge of the Other Spirit
shimmering through its physical encasements. Surely
there can be no accident, or superfluous illusion, or
arbitrary unnecessary sundering of mind from mind
in such a union. Nature and the natural body must
'belong with the experience of Other Mind, even in its
ideal condition. Of myself, I seem to have only mind;
of the Other, only body: and yet, as I think it through,
there seems to be nothing about that body which con-
ceals the spirit — body seems to do no more in separating
than to fix and define the simple other-ness of that Other
from myself; in all other respects it does but give me
that Other Mind in more tangible form than by expe-
rience of its inner life on its own grounds alone, I
could have it.

Let me pursue my reflection a step further. I have
sometimes sat looking at a comrade, speculating on
this mysterious isolation of self from self. Why are
we so made that I gaze and see of thee only thy Wall,
and never Thee? This Wall of thee is but a movable
part of the Wall of my world ; and I also am a Wall to
thee : we look out at one another from behind masks.
How would it seem if my mind could but once be within
thine; and we could meet and without barrier be with
each other? And then it has fallen upon me like a
shock — as when one thinking himself alone has felt a
presence — But I am in thy soul. These things around
me are in thy experience. They are thy own; when I
touch them and move them I change thee. When

266 HOW MJEX KXOW GOD

I look on them I see what thou seest; when I listen, I
hear what thou hearest. I am in the great Room of
thy soul; and I experience thy very experience. For
where art thou? Not there, behind those eyes, within
that head, in darkness, fraternizing with chemical pro-
cesses. Of these, in my own case, I know nothing,
ind will know nothing; for my existence is spent not
behind my Wall, but in front of it. I am there, where
I have treasures. And there art thou, also. This
world in which I live, is the world of thy soul: and
being within that, I am within thee. I can imagine
no contact more real and thrilling than this; that we
should meet and share identity, not through ineffable
inner depths (alone), but here through the foregrounds
of common experience; and that thou shouldst be — not
behind that mask — but here, pressing with all thy con-
sciousness upon me, containing me, and these things o£
mine. This is reality: and having seen it thus, I can
never again be frightened into monadism by reflections
which have strayed from their guiding insight.

Any connecting medium is apt to appear as an obstacle
to direct relationship ; on the other hand any obstacle
may discover itself to be a mediator, sign of unbroken
continuity. The sea separates, — or the sea connects;
it cannot do one without doing the other also. So
Nature may be interpreted in its relation to social con-
sciousness, as the visible pledge and immediate evidence
of our living contact. If there be any social conscious-
ness, it most include within itself just such physical
appearances as we have been reviewing, even in its ideal
perfection*

KNOWLEDGE WE DESIEE 267

We have pictured such ideal knowledge of the Other;
we have faith in it — hut we have not verified it. We
have still to seek experience of the center, the knowledge
of that which knows

CHAPTEE XIX

THAT KNOWLEDGE WE HAVE

A NY experience of an Other Mind which I could
-£JL- either wish or fancy must contain in it, we have
thought, a World, full of sense and variety, full of
obstinacy, and with substance at the back of it — like
this present world. In a truly social experience, such
a world would be known as being the world of the
Other Mind. That world would be known by me; but
as it were through the eyes of the Other Mind. It
would be in some sense a world common to both of us;
known by both at once.

And though it would be perhaps conceivable that we
might carry on mutual relations, each of us having his
own separate world (as, for example, I might imagine
myself in dream conversing with some resident of
heaven or hell, having at the same time a vision of that
spirit's world and reaching some understanding of him
thereby) : yet all real understanding and mutual meas-
urement, mutual judgment, appreciation of character and
so even of self-knowledge, must come through having
the same world with him throughout. A perfect social
experience would require that this present world of
Nature should be known as being the World of the Other,
precisely as it is my World.

And here begins our final enquiry. For as it seems
to me, this present World of Nature is known by me as

THAT KNOWLEDGE WE HAVE 269

being, in just this sense, a common World: it seems
to me, indeed, that it is not otherwise known — that is,
that a knowledge of Other Knower is an integral part
of the simplest knowledge of Nature itself.

It is more readily granted that social consciousness
involves nature-consciousness, than that nature-con-
sciousness involves social consciousness. If for no
other reason, at least for this : that our experience of
Nature is constant; whereas our social experience is, at
hest, intermittent — we can and often do experience
Nature by itself. It is enough if we can find a genuine
social experience now and then — we have not yet done
so much as this — but to make such experience an
organic part of nature-experience would be to make it
perpetual.

Yet I confess that I cannot find a genuine social
experience at all, except as a continuous experience. It
appears to me that all three types of object are inter-
mittent in the same sense, and continuous in the same
sense. Intermittent enough is self-consciousness; yet
self-consciousness is always with us. Intermittent is
also the consciousness of Nature, as an object of direct
attention; yet the undertone of Nature's presence never
deserts me, even in deep sleep. In a way closely simi-
lar to that persistent awareness of my Self, which is
compatible with the most fitful movements of attention
to Self, is the awareness of Other Mind persistently
present in experience, though doubtless less readily dis-
coverable than any other. Inseparably bound up as I
think with the continuous experience of Nature. And
such continuous experience is the foundation of all the

270 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

rest. I shall attempt, first of all, to make clear that
there must be such continuity p, if there, is to be any
social experience at all*

The chief elements of intennittency in social experi-
ence are removed when we look away from the body of
the Other and regard his environing world of objects.
It is in these, we have said, that we know him, quite
as much as in his body. His body appears and disap-
pears to our sight; but his environment does not dis-
appear. It is true that these immediate objects of mine
do cease, when he is gone, to occupy his consciousness,
and can no longer be counted in his environment. But
his experience of Nature was not limited to immediate
objects, and never is so limited. Any idea of a thing,
is an idea of that thing placed in a world of space and
energy which remains a constant object. Our Space
does not move as we move about in it, nor does our
idea of it alter ; our placings are successful, coherent,
unconf used, and for any moment absolute, only because
our ideas reach an unvarying field for these varying
locations. If, therefore, at any time I have known an
Other ; and in knowing him have known Nature as his
object; then this same Nature, — with its Space-field,
Force-field, and the like — does not cease to be his
Object when he disappears.

As my own physical world is not bounded, at any
time, by the partition or forest or hill that happens
to limit my vision, but extends with my Space in all
directions indefinitely, — sodoes his physical world indef-
initely extend, wherever he may be — reaches through-
out my Space, reaches me and my place, reaches Sub-
stance— that same Substance which I also reach as my

THAT KNOWLEDGE WE HAVE i71

ultimate object. If I have once got into his world, I
cannot get out of it while he endures, — any more than
he can get out of my world, so long as I can mean him;
and these fundamental objects of mine, which I sum up
in the word Nature, if they have ever been common
objects, common to him and me, can never thereafter
cease to be common objects. If my own continuous
experience of Nature has ever been a social experience
it can never thereafter lose its social reference.

But I seem to imply that there can be a beginning
of social experience, and so a time when it was not —
a time when my experience of Nature was mine alone.
What I am required to show is that social experience
has no beginning, except with physical experience
itself: that my knowledge of Nature and of Other
Mind are in their whole history interlocked, and
inseparable. If Nature is ever common object, it has
always been common object.

Let us consider how a social experience might be
supposed to begin, as at times it does appear to begin,
even abruptly. I think myself alone, for example, and
with uncomfortable surprise find myself observed. It
seems to me that I experience a jarring change of
scene : my various objects have now to be connected
up, in swift series, with the intruder's eyes. They
have been exclusive objects ; they have suddenly and
perforce become common. They are all seared with
this new relationship, as with a running breath of
flame, and delivered over to joint ownership. Such
readjustments often take perceptible time to effect.
Have we not here a sufficient contrast between solitude

272 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

and society, showing that social experience may 'begin
— being imposed as an addition upon an experience
not social ?

What such a transition does unmistakably show is
that exclusive property in the contents of experience is
possible and may have distinct value attached to it.
Such exclusive property is made possible by sensible
barriers, such as opaqueness and distance. When I
say, "I am entirely alone and unobserved," I am put-
ting my trust in these barriers. But when I resort to
a barrier, I confess that the objects which I thereby seek
to monopolize or conceal are in some danger of being
known by Others. They are already thought of by
me as being sharable. And if they are sharable, it
is because they are already in the World of an Other
Mind ; there are continuous lines through space
between him and me ; our world of Nature is already
common. Is it not clear that when I suppose myself
alone, and regard my solitude as an achievement, I am
in that very thought acknowledging my world of Space
and Nature to be a world common to me and Others ?
My negative sociability has a very positive social con-
sciousness at its basis.

What such experiences imply and illustrate may be
more compactly stated in terms of the logic of com-
munication, as follows : In order that any two beings
should establish communication, they must already
have something in common. For when I consider the
two beings, prior to their communication, as apart
from one another, I must consider at the same time the
field through which they must pass to approach each
other: and this field is already a common field. Two

THAT KNOWLEDGE WE HAVE 273

beings wholly independent, having no common region
to measure their distance from one another, having
between them no continuity through which to travel
toward each other, are lacking in any " toward " —
are unable therefore to approach each other, cannot
come together. All actual approach implies a deeper-
going presence as an accomplished fact.

Given a minimal core of communication, and further
communication may spin itself out upon that core, may
grow intense and varied, develop its ups and downs, its
relative presences and absences. But given nothing at
all — nothing at all can happen. If then, experience
ever becomes actually social, it has, in more rarefied
condition, always been so; and hence is, in the same
fundamental sense, continuously so.1

There is some satisfaction in reducing our ques-
tion to this alternative : that social experience is either
always present or never present. If now we can show
that we have at any time a veritable experience of

1 There is indeed no sufficient reason for supposing that the sociality
of my nature-experience continues to exist after my fellow has gone in
any different sense than before he appeared. The episode of his coming
and going does not change the physical aspect of my world ; those objects
of Nature seem intrinsically ready to be observed by an Other Mind, to be
essentially public in their constitution. If I were actually alone in this
same cosmos, it is difficult to think that I should be without the idea of
possible Others, conceived of as sharing it with me ; it is difficult to believe
that Nature could be experienced a«* simply meine Vorstdlung — for the
physical object itself, the common thing, seems to present itself as numer-
ously knowable, having many unused knowable aspects or valencies which
I with my single point of view can never exhaust. Nature seems strue-
twrally common, or let us say commune ; made up with reference to many
co-experiencing minds. My thought of Nature suffers no jar as men
come and go, for soci-ability is its element. In experiencing it, I am
potentially experiencing the Other, and continuously.

274 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

Other Mind, we show that we have such experience
continually. I believe that this can be shown.

For suppose that experience is never social. In
making this supposition, we mean to contrast the sup-
posed non-social experience with a supposed social
experience. In imagining my experience to be con-
fined to myself and my objects, I admit or assume that
I have an Idea of my experience not-so-confined ; that
I know what a social experience would be like. Now I
submit that this Idea of a social experience would
not ~be possible, unless such an experience were actual.
Otherwise stated, — In any sense in which I can imagine,
or think, or conceive an experience of Other mind, in
that same sense I have an experience of Other Mind,
apart from which I should have no such Idea.

Por every supposition we may make to the effect
that our idea of Other Mind is a " mere idea " to which
no real experience corresponds, — that our supposed
social experience is, in reality, subjective, — implies
that we have in mind a type of experience in com-
parison with which we can condemn our supposed
social experience as merely subjective. But the only
type of experience in comparison with which any ex-
perience can be judged as merely subjective, is a non-
subjective experience. The only point of view from
which our supposed social experience can ~be criticized
as incomplete is the point of mew of social experience
itself. The only ground upon which this idea can be
judged a u mere idea " is the ground of this same idea
as not mere, namely, as actually bringing me into pres-
ence of Mind which is not my own.

Leibniz, for example, judges that all experience is

THAT KNOWLEDGE WE HATE 272

monadic, and that monads do not in actuality experi-
ence each other, though to themselves they seem to do
so. In making this hypothesis, Leibniz presents to
himself the world of monads, and he knows their rela-
tions to be other than they seem : he at any rate occupies
a non-monadic position, is for the time being an inter-
monadic Mind. And any one who judges that he —
and God — know the actual reach o£ ideas to fall short
of their apparent reach, does thereby assert that his
idea has not thus fallen short. There is no degree of
outwardness of which we can think ; no degree of real-
ity which we incline to deny to idea j but in that thought
we have claimed it for our idea. Let me represent to
myself the Other Subject, his living center, as inac-
cessible to my experience ; then either I deny myself
nothing conceivable, or else I have that which I deny.

An objection (or, let me say, 2Ae objection): may not
this idea of a genuine social experience, which you say
guarantees the experience, be an ideal, i.e., a conception
of something we may desire and think of, which we may
well use to criticize what we have, admitting that we
have it not ? Surely, not every ideal implies the expe-
rience, but rather the contrary.

Answer : An ideal is either an extension of experience
as given, or an innate standard.

The idea of a genuine experience of Other Mind is
not an extension of other types of experience. Imag-
ination has its ways of building improvements on
experience by combining, enlarging, extending what is
given, according to known types of relation. But if
the idea of Other Mind were not already given, it could

276 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

not be built up in this way. Certainly not by any
arrangement of physical ideas in physical relations; nor
yet by any arrangement of psychical ideas in psychical
relations; nor by any union of physical and psychical.
To reach the idea from these, we must use the special
relation of Other-self-hood, which is the idea itself.
Since my idea of social experience is uniquely different
from all such constructions within the physical and
psychical worlds, it is not an ideal based on them. It
is not an ideal by construction at all; what we seek is
simply the thing, social experience, in its unique differ-
ence from all immanent variations of other fields of expe^
rience. If this unique difference is an ideal merely, it
is not an ideal by imaginative construction, — it must
be innate.

To say that an idea is innate, in Cartesian fashion,
may mean simply that it is once for all there, and there
is nothing more to be said about it. Or it may mean
that the idea is due ultimately to some outer source
(ancestral or divine) ; whereby we only reinvest in that
Outer Source the difficulty of the idea in question —
namely, how my ideas can reach that which is not-myself .
Or, it may mean, in Kantian fashion, that the idea is a
native and necessary form by which the Self orders the
material of its experience, as otherwise given. Of these,
the Kantian form is doubtless the strongest: and our
social experience does most closely resemble, as we have
noticed, a form of interpretation, a successful hypoth-
esis clothing our manifold experience-stuff — ultimately
sensation — with social meaning.

As an hypothesis our Idea of Other Mind has certain
interesting peculiarities* That it is not framed imagina-

THAT KNOWLEDGE WE HAVE 277

tively of materials taken elsewhere from experience, we
have observed. But further, there is no way in which
it could be proved false, or even brought to other test
than its use. There are various ways in which my
social judgments may err, and suffer correction in expe-
rience. Thus I may impute to a friend a false motive,
accepting his statement that I am in error. This judg-
ment clearly relies on the more authentic social expe-
rience for correction. So with other errors, as by mis-
taking the identity of a person, or by mistaking a post
for a man ; these are corrected with reference to a bet-
ter social experience. There is no type of error to which
social experience is subject which can refer me away
from social experience for correction, — none which can
send me back into myself for final court of appeal. As
an hypothesis, the idea of Other Mind cannot be tested,
— nor can it be withdrawn.

But now, when we suppose that this idea of ours is
an hypothesis only, what more than hypothesis do we
think it might be ? We think, do we not, that it might
be a genuine social experience, and no mere hypothe-
sis ? But " genuine social experience " is the hypothe-
sis itself, if it is such. And the contrast between real
and apparent in social experience is only such contrast
as social experience has already furnished us with. My
idea of social experience is then, of social experience as
it is : my ideal and my idea are the same, — they refer
me to what I have.

But let me make clear that in referring our idea of
Other Mind to experience, I do not mean that it is
derived, in Humian fashion, as a copy from a previous
impression. It would be as little to the point to suggest

278 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

that my idea of myself is derived from a previous
impression of myself. My idea of myself is at the same
time an experience of myself (unless my idea flies wild).
So, unless as frequently happens I use some paper ciuv
rency in referring to Other Mind, my idea of Other
Mind is at the same time an experience of Other Mind.
Let me hut think what I mean hy the Other Mind, and
there, as I find my Self, I find the Other also. As an
idea of a fundamental and constant experience, bound
up with my equally permanent experiences of Self and
Nature, this idea is not prior to experience; but is indeed
prior to all further social experience, to all such as is
intermittent and subject to error. This fundamental
experience, and its idea, deserve, from their position in
knowledge, to be called a concrete a priori knowledge.

Of the logic of this proof that we have actual expe-
rience of Other Mind I shall have more to say in a later
chapter. It stands before us now somewhat barely.
Unconvincingly, too, unless we can clothe with some liv-
ing sense that strange assertion that Nature is always
present to experience as known by an Other. That we
cannot genuinely conceive ourselves as mentally alone in
this cosmos, though we can well imagine ourselves bod-
ily alone. That the inherent publicity of Nature, the
fitness of all its objects to be communally experienced, is
no empty potentiality, but a potentiality, founded (like
other potentialities) on some actuality. We must now
try to bring that experience more vividly before us j for
we can hardly believe in an experience which we are yet
unable to disentangle, or verify in ourselves. But let
this conviction stand as a firm ground in our further

THAT KNOWLEDGE WE HAVE 279

search : that we should have no idea of an Other Mind
or of a social experience unless we had the experience
itself. That in whatever sense we can think, or imagine,
or even deny, the reality of that experience, — in that
same sense it must be and is real to us.

There are, I think, three natural difficulties in the
way of distinguishing the undertone of social experience
amid the general rumble of the ground-levels of expe-
rience. First, that we cannot identify that constant
Other with any particular individual, yet an Other
must be an individual. Second, we cannot help regard-
ing the experience of Nature as sufficient in itself, the
presence of Others in the world being additional and
wholly separable fact — that the experience of Nature
may be at the same time a social experience we can
more readily believe than that it must be. Third, that
we cannot verify the social experience socially, in the
same way that we verify the facts of Nature. I shall
consider these three, beginning with the last named, —
reserving the others to the following chapter.

An object of knowledge or experience is, for the most
part, a thing which you and I can verify together. I
assert that something is true, in history, in physics, in
mathematics ; and when I make such statements to you,
I mean that you also can go to the same facts and
experiences and find the same thing that I have found.
The truth of my assertion means that it is valid for you
and other real persons in the same way that it is valid
for me. This association of minds which we call " we,"
accustomed as it is to sit in united judgment upon facts
external to itself, cannot in like fashion sit in judgment

280 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

upon itself. If we doubt " we/5 we know not to whom
to appeal. We can hardly find our fundamental social-
ity, because we can hardly get so far away from it as
to doubt it.

Nature is pre-eminently the world of socially verifiable
things, the world of scientific research — which is gen-
eral human collaboration on a common object. We
look at Nature through the eyes of a social world. As
we look at physical things through two eyes at once,
and our prospect thereby acquires something in solidity
and depth ; so in quite similar fashion we see objects
and truths in general through two pairs of eyes, through
indefinite multitudes of eyes, and thereby acquire that
deepest solidity of judgment which we call " universal-
ity." Universality is a social habit ; the necessary habit
of looking at any truth as if not I alone but the whole
conscious universe were looking at it with me. The
simplest judgment of physical things is universal in this
sense ; the most particular matter of fact, as I place it
in my world of Nature, is so placed by help of this deep
sense of the "cloud of witnesses" to whom this fact
belongs, as well as to myself. Without this habitual
democracy of judgment, this habitual loss of my life in
the universal judgment, I can have no life at all in Nature
or in the world of truth.

And just because my social consciousness is that with
which I am thinking my world, I am not at the same
time and in the same way thinking of it, — as one does
not see his own eyes in the usual processes of seeing
things. When we speak of experience, what is called
to mind is usually experience with the experiences left
out ; experience just so far as it can easily be common

THAT KNOWLEDGE WE HAVE 281

object and no farther. Hume, in his examination of
experience, found no Self ; he had gone out of his house,
as one noted rejoinder had it, and looking in at the
window was unable to find himself at home. In truth
it is not I alone, but we who go out, and cannot be dis-
covered by ourselves in that house. And that same
reflexive turn of consciousness which takes notice of
Self, as of something always present, must, if we are
right, discover the Other also, my other I, perpetual
sustainer of universality in my judgments of experience.
When, then, we think of "experience" as something
solitary and subjective, we are cutting it off from our-
selves, and calling upon the Other Mind to view it so,
together with us. Holding it thus, at arm's length, we
criticize it, and as we thought, by means of an idea of
something better : we criticize our solitary experience
by the standard of a conceived social experience which
would be more comprehensive. And this idea of a
better, we thought, confessed the reality of that better.
In truth, we should read the situation the other way.
That experience, thus held off at arm's length and crit-
icized, is not the Eeal Experience, judged by standard
of an Idea of a better. That criticized experience is
but a conceptual part of reality, abstracted from its con-
text, and criticized not by idea (alone) but by the reality
itself. The real and the conceptual have changed places.
It is through my present inseparable community with
The Other that I know that abstracted "experience*5'
to be incomplete.

CHAPTER XX
OUE NATURAL REALISM AND REALISM ABSOLUTE

OUR second difficulty in finding social experience is
that the experience of Nature, though admitting
social experience as an appendage, still seems to be
something else than social experience, separable from
it, sufficient in itself. Any particular person may come
and go, making no difference to my experience of
Nature. Come and go, not only from my eye-sight, but
from this World of Time itself. Any particular per-
son, Nature is independent of; and if of any, then, we
reason, of all. The soci-ability of Nature is an extra-
neous circumstance. Nature first is, and then is expe-
rienced by us ; Nature first is, and then is mine — and
yours — and theirs. This is our besetting natural
Realism ; and it is the most persistent difficulty in the
way of finding social experience.

It is fair to recall, at first, that if this natural Real-
ism is right, there is no such thing as social experience.
If every mind may come and take its own view of
Nature without making any difference to Nature, hence
without weaving into the nature-experience of an Other
any necessary reference to itself, then a solitary experi-
ence of Nature is possible. But if a pure solitude is
possible, it is perpetual. Experience is always and nec-
essarily social, or never, — these are our alternatives.

But we wish, if passible, to meet our natural Realism

OUR NATURAL BEALISM 283

on its own ground, rather than on our own> and satisfy
it. Its own ground is, that Nature becomes a medium
for social intercourse as it were accidentally and exter-
nally, as one picks up a stone which chance has shaped
to the hand. Nature-experience becomes associated with
social consciousness; but is itself to be defined independ-
ently, or as That Which serves social consciousness.
In knowing Nature I am indeed always dimly conscious
of its fortunate publicity. I know myself as merging, on
this side of my experience, with whatever Other Minds
may happen to be extant. But all this social reference
is indeterminate, and adventitious ; it rides on the out-
side of Nature. Nature is hospitable ; offers infinite and
permanent possibilities of sociality; caring not, how-
ever, whether many points of view are occupied, or all,
or none. Nature-drama goes on, careless of the seat-
ing of the house, or of the gossip there. This is our
natural Realism, so far as it has bearing on social
experience.

Now all this is report of truth. I find Nature ready
made, and so do you. This world, in its constitution, is
not my doing ; nor is it the doing of any one else situ-
ated as I am, nor of any assemblage of such. Nature is
object of our knowledge; and knowledge is co-extensive
with empiricism, — that is, with the attitude of tak-
ing what is given, in obedience (not, of course, without
activity, nor without hope). Have we not contended,
at some length, that the ultimate object of knowl-
edge has its independence of us; its perfect priority, to
which we who wish to live submit? It is true that any
Mind depends on Nature as Nature does not depend on
tiiat Mind. I would not seek to minimize this independ-

284 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

ent priority, even obstinacy, of Nature. For it is just
in this character of ultimate opposition to me and my
wishes, of high superiority to any doings or thinkings
of mine, that Nature begins to assume for me the
unmistakable aspect of Other Mind. We must dwell
for a time on this point.

So long as our attention is given to a physical object
for its own sake, or for the sake of further physical ends,
the independence of the object seems exhausted in that
mysterious obstinacy which demands our submissive
attention, our empirical attitude. But that obstinacy
does not fail to call forth enquiry ; it does appear as a
"mystery." We cannot accept the simple There-ness
of Nature as final truth (any more than we could accept
pain as the last word of pain). We require to know
why it is there, and by what principle we are made
dependent upon it.

The " objectivity " of Nature requires to be explained :
it admits explanation. This is the critical feature of
the case. For in so far as we are able to conceive the
obstinacy of Nature as explained by, or dependent upon,
some further source of strength, we approach the dis-
covery of a more fundamental object. We shall find,
I think, that physical experience, taken as a solitary
experience, has no very perfect independence of my Self;
is not so external but that it can at any moment be
conceived internal to me — and does actually roll away
from sensation into memory (which exists only in me)
instantaneously (as in a rolling wheel the point of con-
tact instantly leaves the ground) and without substan-
tial change : — on all these things idealism has suffi-
ciently enlarged (and the force of this idealistic motive

OUK NATUBAL REALISM 285

comes from conceiving Nature-experience as solitary).
We shall find that that which is most completely inde-
pendent of me, external to me, is not physical experi-
ence per se, but Other Self. The independence of Na-
ture hangs from this more fundamental independence,
and not vice versa. The objectivity of the physical
object is derivative : it shines by reflected light, not by
its own.

Let us present experience to ourselves in simple terms,
as an interplay between an active Self and an active
External Reality. Grant, tentatively, a degree of inde-
pendent activity to each. My own independent activ-
ity in making experience what it is may be fairly esti-
mated by that force of expectant imagination with
which I meet and place the materials that sensation
offers me. The mass of idea which I call my Self,
my "apperceptive mass," carries on a spontaneous self-
projection, running-ahead in anticipation of experience :
and no experience can come to me which is not an
answer to certain organic questionings set out to receive
events. Though I do not determine what the detail
and particularity of experience may be, yet I do expect
detail and particularity. This scouting-wave of my
idea-system thus defines a complete physical world, —
in all but the last touch of answer-to-question. My
present moment expects the next, in all but the last
touch of change which sensation must give. Large
world-making powers must, on such showing, be cred-
ited to the Self. Cut off suddenly that relation to
External Reality in sensation ; and this world-expecting,
world-forecasting, world-spinning activity does not cease

286 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

— physical worlds still exist for me in imagination, or
in dream. Here is a complete dream-Space, dream-
Nature and nature-processes, dream-social-conditions too,
and all filled in with sufficient dream-detail and partic-
ularity, on whose development I expectantly wait with
all appearance of passive, empirical attitude — though
it is my own world.

There is large creative power here ; yet such, we think,
as a touch of sensation would shatter like a house of
cards. That same own-made-world is doubtless per-
manently present to me ; but as the stars in daylight,
quantitatively annihilated. What vividness and defi
niteness I now seem to possess comes, we must still think,
chiefly through this flood of sense which irrupts upon
my anticipative out-goings. Cut me off in earnest from
my experience of Nature, and I tend to become vague,
indefinite, uncertain of myself. Let me lose a little in
sight or hearing ; and I find how much not only self
but sense has been concerned in that influx. However
vigorous the impetus of advance-weaving on the part
of my ideas — vigorous enough at times to falsify
experience, displacing feebler sensation — my own activ-
ity always accepts the irruptive material as its own
authority and completion. Toward that Outer Reality
I hold myself as toward that which sustains me from
moment to moment in my present being.

Is not that outer activity then essentially creative in its
constant action (as probably also in its original action)
— creative of me? My dependence upon Nature, my
momentary submission to its independent, obstinate,
objective decision of what Fact and Truth shall be, both
in principle and in detail : — is not this a finding of my

OUR NATURAL REALISM 287

own mind? It is here, in this momentary (as well as
permanent) creation of my Self that I begin, I say, to
find Nature taking on the aspect of an Other Mind.

For if the full-fledged otherness of that which is
thus over against me cannot be doubted, neither can
it be doubted that this which so immediately becomes
Self, makes Self, is already a Self even in its other-
ness, — namely, an Other Self. We find the weakness
of natural Kealism when we consider whether a physi-
cal experience so organically and actively concerned in
mind-existence and mind-process could exist also, and
fully itself, apart from such active relations. If only
I were independent of Nature, I might think Nature
independent of Self. But since Nature obstinate is
Nature creative, and creative of mind ; since my deep-
est roots and those of all co-experiencing mind are in
her deepest objectivity, I cannot clear Nature of self-
hood, though I can well clear her of my own self or of
any other particular self.

Space, here, is my space, — also everybody's space ;
and is known as such. Energy is everybody's energy:
Nature as a whole is everybody's Nature. Even now,
space, and the rest, are integral parts of everybody's
mind — are idea and experience at the same time; are
the activity of each finite thinker, — but an activity
held empirically in place by the active decisiveness of
Outer Reality. You and I vanish, and leave spacfc
behind — leave thereby so much of our mind behind,
and more. Leave behind necessary elements in our con-
tinuity,individuality, unity, even character. Leave them
behind in what condition ? In the same condition in
which we have always known them: as something com-

288 HOW MEN" KNOW GOD

munieated by an Other Mind, and meant by an Other
Mind. For in immediately experiencing my Self as
limited and determined (in the ways described) by an
Absolute Other, I am experiencing that Other as Other
Mind. As space is found limited by no other than
more space, so Self is found limited and individualized
by no other than Other Selfhood.

This is our fundamental social experience. And I
wish to make it clear that this experience is not an
inference, but an immediate experience. As simply as
Nature presents itself as objective, just so simply and
directly is the Other Mind present to me in that objec-
tivity, as its actual meaning. I do not first know my
physical world as a world of objects and then as a world
of shared objects : it is through a prior recognition of
the presence of Other Mind that my physical experience
acquires objectivity at all.1 The objectivity of Nature

1 Nothing is gained in differentiating physical objects from psychical
objects by pointing out (as is commonly attempted) that the psychical objects
are for one only, whereas the physical objects are also objects for another.
This simply doubles the mystery. I have now to understand how these
physical things can be objects for both of us at once, obstinate to both of
us, and not to one only: the nature of objectivity itself with its capacity
of being equally objective to two souls, or even to an infinite number, is
not in the least illumined. There is rather the additional mystery how I
know (as it seems I do immediately know by considering the physical
object alone) that it can be objective to others as well as to myself. Are
these objects, then, labelled "common," while the others are without such
labels? have they about them some physical mark which points the mind
to an other knower? Hardly this. The only way in which I can know an
object to be common is by catching it in the act of being common, that
is, by knowing it as known by other mind. The social experience must
have a prior and original recognizableness. And this recognition of other
mind than my own is a simultaneous recognition of those aspects of expe-
rience which such mind needs for the maintenance of its intercourse with
me, without loss of its own separateness of career.

OUR NATURAL REALISM 289

is its community, not two facts but one : but the whole
truth of this one fact (which whole I do not see unless
I note what I am thinking with] — the whole of this
fact is community.

Here then is the point in which natural Realism is both
right and wrong. That which limits and opposes the
Self, setting bounds to our expectations, offering instead
of our desire its / am, is indeed Not-self. That outer
individuality is first — our own follows. That outer
world asserts itself upon me, and creates nie; even my
"forms of apperception," my space, my time, I accept
from it and reissue — even here I am empirical first and
creative afterward. In so far natural Realism is right.
But it is just because the empirical factors of expe-
rience extend thus through my whole selfhood that this
Not-myself is known in positive terms as Other-self.

In failing to penetrate through the blank otherness
of Nature to the spirit that is its support, natural Real-
ism falls short of the truth.1 Idealism corrects this

1 In the physical experience of outer reality Kant descried the point at
which subjective idealism is broken : in Wahrnehmung (physical percep-
tion) he found the active effect of the unknown Thing-in-itself. At this
point he thought that experience reaches an unusual pitch of outwardness
— reaching, indeed, beyond the Self, achieving the impossible. What is
the evidence of this feat ? It is that the self here discovers itself in
process of being made ; finds the source of those individual characters of
itself, which since they define itself cannot be from itself. But Kant did
not note that in thus viewing itself as a particular Self, the Ego is accom-
plishing the standpoint of another (and universal) Self ; and that this
standpoint is a permanent part of its own being. Hence he misread the
relation between the active non-ego and the ego in the process of physical
experience. For causality (on his own showing) it is not ; but communication
it may well be, — and self-communication, which is creation.

For more explicit discussion of this matter, see the explanatory essay,
"The Knowledge of Independent Reality."

290 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

error ; and in correcting this error, falls as a rule into
another — it refers the experience of nature to a spiritj
which turns out to be only the solitary finite self. The
logic even of ' absolute idealism ' usually fails here, as
Professor Howison has well shown.1 The corrective of
both this natural realism and this solitary idealism must
be found, not by changing the venue of the question to
the moral consciousness, but by an appeal from natural
realism to a realism of social experience.

If, then, I wish in simplest fashion to find my funda-
mental social experience, let me consider that feature
of experience which I call the independence, or objec-
tivity, of the physical world about me. Let me consider
that until it is disabused of its finality, and seen to be
open to challenge; let me consider it until I see that in
this knowledge (that the objectivity there has a further
account to give) I am already in present experience of
that Other Mind which in Nature communicates itself
to me. The only way to a realism of social experience
is through a Non-realism in regard to the surface of
Nature. What we reach is a super-natural Realism, or
a Social Realism, or more truly a Realism of the Abso-
lute — not far removed from Absolute Idealism.

1 The Conception of God, Royce, Le Conte, Howison, Mezes, page
104, etc.

CHAPTER XXI

THE GOD OF NATURE AND THE KNOWLEDGE

OF MAN

BUT finally, who and what is this Subject, to which
we have been referring in such vague terms as the
Other, the fundamental social object ?

It cannot be identified with any particular other per-
sonality such as these with whom I enter into conver-
sation and reach various stages of acquaintance and
concrete intercourse. For I recognize them as being
co-dependent with me upon this same Other Mind
revealed in Nature. In this intercourse with them there
are beginnings and endings ; and the entrance of any
one of them into my life is relatively speaking an acci-
dent, making unquestionable historical difference in
that general fund of idea with which I regard Nature,
but not determining the character of any fact of Nature
such as he and I might be called upon to give common
witness to.

Further, my knowledge of any such individual per-
son is uncertain, with varying grades of uncertainty.
I am liable to mistake at many points in interpreting
his thoughts and experiences; I may be mistaken in his
identity ; I may even be mistaken in judgment whether
a conscious subject is there — whether any given phys-
ical object is a body to an Other Mind. I never know
how much of my physical world is at any time offickt-

292 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

ing as body, and how much is only environment. 1
have no absolute assurance of these minds severally.
It is true that on occasion I may be surer of the reality
of a given fellow man than I am of my own : I may
call upon my friend to assure me of my own sanity, by
acknowledging as real for him also an object of mine
which I fear may be an hallucination. But I am more
likely to judge his sanity by his assent to the reality of
objects which apart from him I regard as unquestionably
real. I am not sure of these fellow minds severally.

But the doubts to which my experience of individual
persons is liable must diminish when I consider them not
separately but together. The reality which I can ques-
tion in the detached person becomes substantial in groups
of persons, in my total historical context, in collective
humanity. The uncertainty which holds against any
one, can hardly hold against the whole. May not this
fundamental Other Mind of which we are in search be
simply my total world of Others in its collective bearing
upon me?

Such a world of other spirits does not come and go ;
it was before me, and shall be after me. Out of such
fellow beings and the world which they have built up,
I come; my creation is theirs; and to such, having
myself shared in creation, I hand on the same world to
be perpetuated as humanity's world. Might not Nature
itself be conceived as an expression of the common
will of such an oveiyindividual or composite entity?
Through this physical community our developing inter-
course is built up ; through it, humanity persists in its
own being, and communicates being, from generation to
generation. Is it not this common will of mankind, or

KNOWLEDGE OF GOD AND OF MAN 293

of collective spirit generally, of which in Nature I
become aware ?

There are not wanting observable facts of our social
consciousness which support such a conjecture. Fre-
quent intercourse with fellow men does much to deter-
mine the stability of physical experience in comparison
with the world of imagination. The hermit, the lonely
sheep-driver, is likely to succumb to his illusions, living
with them in preference to the world which we of the
majority call real.

The explorer, the polar traveller, the man in solitary
confinement, find the feeling of unreality a more com-
mon visitor than we do and threatening to become a
permanent companion. The "established character "
of Nature is sharpest where men are thickest, is clearly
some function of the volume of our empirical conver-
sation : it gives the impression of being a consensus
effect.

But there are several reasons why we cannot accept
this theory of the Other. One is that any such consen-
sus implies a prior unity ; we communicate because we
are already one, — a proposition which is as valid for an
indefinite number of communicators as it is for any two,
and as valid for present humanity and past humanity
as for any two contemporaries. The entire individual-
ity and permanence of Nature implies a corresponding
individual permanence in the Subject whose commun-
icated being this Nature is. Upon such ultimate unity
of substance the unity of each finite self is based.

Further, that is no genuine social experience which
is not known as such by the participants. Two beings,

294 HOW MEN KFOW GOD

we have said, can come into communication only if they
already have some point in common : but if the beings
are conscious beings, and their communication is to be
conscious communication, we may specify our proposi-
tion thus, That two conscious beings can communicate
only if they already have some known point in common,
some object known by each as object to both. If I
have any genuine social experience at all, then at some
point I do actually know the Other Mind in its know-
ing — beyond any doubt or shifting of identity ; beyond
any possibility of error in the intentional character of
the experience — that is, in the address of the communi-
cation to me. This seems a great deal to claim of the
experience of Other Mind in Nature; but I cannot
escape these conclusions. And I see clearly that there
is in no assembly of fellow minds any conscious reference
of Nature to me; as I see that I have no conscious part
in presenting my world of objects to them. It is use-
less to appeal to subconscious activity, for an activity
that is unintended is not my own.

In short, we are all, whether singly or collectively,
empirical knowers of Nature. But if there are none
but empirical knowers in the world there is no social
experience. I am only in presence of an Other Mind
when I have pressed through the region of my passiv-
ity, and turning its corner, have come upon that which
is there actively and intentionally creating me.

Even were there, in addition to all visible passive
knowers in the world, one all-comprehensive passive
knower, we should be no nearer a conscious unity. For
unless he too could pierce the obstinacy and self-asser-
tiveness of the world confronting him, he would still be,

KNOWLEDGE OP GOD AND OF MAN 293

so far as his consciousness is concerned, a self-enclosed
being, and would be obliged as we are to work through
the problem of that dependence to a knowledge of that
Other on which he depends. There is no sociality for
any knower, so we now discover, until the objectivity of
Nature wins its further meaning, and is found as an
intentional communication of a Self wholly active.

It may be that the more we press the conclusions of
our position, the less we shall be able to recognize in
any concrete characters of our own experience, the ex-
perience here described. We have made all social experi-
ence depend upon a conscious knowledge in experience
of a being, who in scope and power might well be identi-
fied with God. We have been led by the successive re-
quirements of our logic to the position that our first and
fundamental social experience is an experience of God.
Where in our continuous current consciousness do we
recognize any such element as this ?

Conspicuous in experience such knowledge certainly
is not ; and as permanent knowledge, with which we
forever begin, and with which we forever think our
world, we shall not expect it to be conspicuous. It will
be present for the most part in no other form than as
the abiding sense of what stability and certainty we
have, as we move about among men and things ; it will
be present for the most part just as our own force of
self-assertion and self-confidence is present, that force
by which we individually will " to maintain ourselves
in being " in a world known, by what assurance we do
not ordinarily enquire, to be no hostile, nor ultimately
alien, thing. It will be present chiefly in my persistent

296 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

sense of reality in that with which I am dealing, and
in those fellow minds with whom I converse. It will
be present in that sense of reality also in its active
aspect ; in my own degree of what we have called
" objectivity of mind/' my disposition to take experi-
ence with full empirical openness, breast-f orwardly, ori-
ented by the universal or common eye which the fun-
damental God-consciousness gives me. In whatever rigid
scientific acceptance of fact I may accomplish, I detect
the degree of this experience. And whatever conscious-
ness I may have of responsibility and dependence are
workings of the same thing : if I am conscious of obliga-
tion closely conjoined with the simple fact of my exist-
ence ; if I know that what creativity I have and must
have is built upon a continuous docility; in thus know-
ing I am conscious though but indistinctly of my
Absolute Other.

Inseparable from self-consciousness is this experience,
and discernible in all the dimensions and assertions of
self-consciousness. God is known as that of which I
am primarily certain ; and being certain, am certain of
self and of my world of men and men's objects. I
shall always be more certain that God is, than what
he is : it is the age-long problem of religion to bring to
light the deeper characters of this fundamental expe-
rience. But the starting point of this development
(which we shall have occasion to trace in some rough
way) is no mere That Which, without predicates. Sub-
stance is known as Subject : reality from the beginning
is known as God. The idea of God is not an attribute
which in the course of experience I come to attach to
my original whole-idea : the unity of my world which

KNOWLEDGE OF GOD AND OF MAN 297

makes it from the beginning a whole, knowable in sim-
plicity, is the unity oi! other Selfhood.

God then is immediately known, and permanently
known, as the Other Mind which in creating Nature
is also creating me. Of this knowledge nothing can
despoil us ; this knowledge has never been wanting to
the self-knowing mind of man.

Given this original certainty in social experience, the
uncertainty and experimentation in the knowledge of
Other Minds generally can be faced with some confi-
dence ; no failures here can require a " retreat into the
subject " ; I can never whether by the logic of my own
defective social practice or reflection be shut in to myself
alone, a monad without windows. Bat how do I find
my fellow men at all ? I have God ; them I have not.

I answer that here those criteria of the presence of
other minds which at first we thought could not give
us what we required, because they presupposed the idea
of an Other Mind, now have conferred on them the
breath of life. The idea is in our possession ; with this
key all metaphors of mind and mind-relations in
Nature become a living language. I am in possession of
the net which being hung out in experience will gather
in what "supplementation of my own fragmentary
meanings," what response to my questions, may be dis-
coverable there. I have what Fichte calls the concept
of a concept in its outward appearance. My current
social experience, the finding of any fellow finite mind,
is an application of my prior idea of an Other; in a
sense, an application of my idea of God. It is through
the knowledge of God that lam able to Mow men;

398 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

not first through the knowledge of men that I am able
to know or imagine God.

And further, in them I find something which I
require in order to make that consciousness of companion-
ship wholly actual to me. I have some need to repro-
duce the relation to God in a visible relationship within
God's world. Why I must try to make that central
companionship more tangible and physical I do not here
enquire ; but in that need, whatever it is, I may find an
inkling of God's own motive in creating just such a
sphere of things as this visible Nature-field, in which
spirits wander as shapes embedded.

Nor is this applying of the God-idea to these shapes
wholly unliteral. For God is not apart from what he
has created. We have found God only in the relation
of otherness and objectivity. God is other-than-me ;
also other-than-my-f ellow-Others. We have deliberately
dwelt upon the absolute objectivity of God ; or rather,
have chosen to come to the recognition of God in the
absolute object of knowledge. But we have not been
unmindful of the truth that Self includes, and is with,
its objects, in so far as it comprehends them, or is cre-
ating them. God, then, does actually include me, in so
far as I am dependent upon him; does likewise include
those fellow Others, in so far as they also are his
created work.

Nature is not, as I experience it, a consensus effect,
due to the wills of my fellow finite spirits, conscious or
sub-conscious: but I dare not say that their presence
has no part in making Nature what it is, even to my
experience. For Nature, we may say, is the region
where this system of minds does actually coalesce*

KNOWLEDGE OF GOD AND OF MAN 299

Space does not reside in me, nor in any mind ; but in
all minds at once. In space and time and their contents
we have not merely common objects, we have a region
of literal common Mind. It is not that we are each
so constructed after a common pattern called Human
Nature, with certain a priori ideas or forms of arrang-
ing experience, that given certain stimuli at our nerve
ends we all do, as a fact, turn out the same world, each
in his own private copy. I do not in my growth make
up a new space and a new causal system for myself.
I adopt them. Space and Nature are numerically one,
and I by my community with Other Mind, am born
inheritor of that one identical object. In my experience
of Space and Nature I am experiencing identically all
that Other Mind which is contemplating that same
object ; in so far, I have an infallible element in my
knowledge of my finite comrades, as well as in my
knowledge of God.

Existence of conscious beings begins, then, if we are
right, with intimate sociality and dependence ; growth
gives to each conscious being powers of independent
world-building and creativity generally. This present
existence, we say, is an apprenticeship in creativity.
At the same time (and as part of the same fact) we
acquire the power of solitude, jutting out into the alone
— alone perhaps even with reference to God. Such a
monism as this of ours is rather more favorable to per-
sonal freedom and enterprise than such pluralisms as
have usually been defined. For we do not begin as sol-
itary beings and then acquire community : we begin
as social products, and acquire the arts of solitude —

300 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

a direction o£ progress more hopeful for variety and
origination than a progress in the reverse direction.

In applying the name of God to the Other Mind which
in sustaining physical experience does continually create
and communicate itself to us, we have gone indeed
heyond our warrant. We have not here the concep-
tion of God in its fulness. But we have its ground-
work. We have what must justify the animism of our
ancestors, — the inevitable animism of all mankind;
for the finding of spirit in Nature is but the finding
of the truth as continuously experienced.

If the difficult problem, what parts of Nature are to
be regarded as body of Spirit, and what only as envi-
ronment, is not early solved ; if the idea of Other Mind
at first is applied too indiscriminately ; that is all such
work as experience may well take time to perfect.
Nature, we find, is the mediator of God, par excellence.
As for our fellow beings, they are first vessels, recipi-
ent of the meaning already established ; and then sec-
ondarily mediators, as through them the idea of God
receives further definition and content. Meager as the
glimpse of Deity may be which is opened through the
humble channel of the experience of physical Nature,
even through sensation, it is sufficient to initiate that
long course of the knowledge of God in which mankind
has found its highest ambition. But before glancing at
the outline of that growing knowledge I shall ask in
the next chapter to dwell still longer among these severe
questions of truth and experience, enquiring by what
other ways men have tried to secure conscious certainty
of the existence (if not of the presence) of their God.

CHAPTER

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT FOR THE
EXISTENCE OF GOD

TN our search for other Mind we came upon the
-L experience of God, as by surprise. We were looking
for man, and we found God. We discovered that our
fellow Mind can not be touched, except through first
touching God ; that the one point in which we do break
through to unmistakable knowledge of spirit not our-
self is here, in the presence to experience of the Abso-
lute as Other Mind. Which one point being given,
all the rest of social experience with its endless experi-
mentation, trial, error, and infinite acquired skill, can
follow.

We have first found God as a God of physical Nature,
a God through Nature creating ourselves. And herein
lies that literalness of the God-idea which we have
thought necessary for religion. For Nature is the
home of literalness. To be literal means to be real
in the same definite and particular fashion that we sur-
mise in sensation, and realize in the precise work of
physical science. Sensation embodies for us much of
what we conceive all reality ought to be in definiteness
and vivid individuality. Nature has its decisive yea
or nay for every question that can be put to it. We
would not lose these qualities from our religious con-
sciousness. And we do not lose them if we can inter-

302 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

pret the whole individuality of Nature as one with the
individuality of God in its communicated form.

Doubtless we feel in this conception at once the de-
fects of literalness also, — a certain obnoxious and hum-
drum levelling of religion to the status of fact. This
is a fault of emphasis : it is the literal that has been
by necessity uppermost in our discussion, but literalness,
of course, does not tell the whole story of any spirit's
existence. It is merely an attribute which, among the
rest, we should sorely miss if it were absent. It is not
customary, I know, to seek for God at the level of sen-
sation : that is one reason why it has seemed to me
important to have found him there. Sensation may
supply, as it were, a missing dimension to our thought
of God. God must now be to us not less real and
present than Nature, not less definitively here and
now than these impressive objective Facts.

We have no reason to think slightingly of sensation,
or to refer to it as the lowest level of our being. It
marks, in many ways, the line of our limitation;
line of our passivity and dependence; line oftentimes
of intellectual and moral defeat; a region which self
and idea fail to penetrate; but by that same sign
containing the soil and air of the future. The line
of our limitation may be, if we will, the line where
we meet God. Where should we more expect to meet
him?

We have not been expressly undertaking a proof of
the existence of God. But in finding God as a neces-
sary object of experience, have we not, in a way suffi-
cient and decisive, proved his existence? What other

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 303

final proof can we have that any being exists than to
find, or demonstrate, that Being in experience? For
my power of recognizing existence is summed up in
the word experience.

Still, this again has not been the usual procedure of
those who have tried to reach conscious assurance that
there is a God. Proving God has usually meant rea-
soning away to God, by making speculative connections
between the world that now is and its unseen author or
destiny. And if we believe with Kant, and with many
another, that God is not to be found in experience, there
are none but such speculative connections to be made.
We have thought, however, that experience is essen-
tially metaphysical, — the place in which we meet Real-
ity; in experience we are "taught/5 our errors are
corrected, our true ideas confirmed, by what else than
by Keality ? In common action we are dealing with the
passing, — and with the Absolute: and it is for us
to recognize that Absolute as Spirit. The course of
discovery which leads to that recognition — this will be
our interpretation of the process of "proof " of God's
existence.

Such proof is but a clearing of the mind, so that
experience may be recognized for what it is: it is a
banishing of illusions, a consideration of what we may
expect to find, and could wish to find ; and a noting
that this wish of ours corresponds to experience as we
have it. Proof, in this sense, does but follow the route
of prayer, — which also is a u lifting of the mind to
God"; not in any sense equivalent to prayer, but mak-
ing evident that filament of wholly objective rektedness
between man and God which (as a minimal core of com-

304 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

munity) must lie at the center of all ventures toward
further and moral relationship.

What such, proof assumes is simply that God and
the world do stand in permanent organic relationship,
and that the traces of this relationship cannot be lack-
ing in experience. Proof, in this sense, is a necessary
concern of religion ; whose function is to make the way
to God plain to all men, to escape from the accidental
and the fortuitous, to establish universal and conscious
intercourse between the human and the divine. Proof
in set terms has never been the work of religion ; for
religion knows how to convey proof, or demonstration, in
the form of deeds. Religion practically and personally
points men to God ; let philosophy give men the con-
scious possession and certainty of this which religion
has in deed established. The proof of God, we may
say, is the good faith of man with regard to religion.
It is not a thing with which religion can dispense ; nor
has religion ever been willing to forgo it.

If proof, then, is the finding of the way to God from
where one at any time consciously stands, the proofs
may be as many as the standpoints are many. But in
so far as we can describe in general terms the conscious
situation of all men, there is but one way to God, and
one proof. We shall attempt to make clear in this
chapter the nature of that proof in the barest possible
sketch, — and after all is there not some keen and pro-
per satisfaction in the utmost bareness of statement,
when a truth has once been grasped as truth ?

Nature appears to men as their most general bond
of community. Nature also appears as existence par

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 305

excellence. When we lose sight of God, Nature becomes
our standard of reality. If we have a God we should
like to make his existence as sure as that ! Hence it is
that most attempts at proof of God have begun with
Nature, and have tried to make his existence secure by
showing him in some valid connection with this world,
such as that of cause to the world as effect. God as
cause of the world would be real even as the world is
real. The so-called cosmological argument follows this
line of connection, and finds that the world has a single
conscious cause, itself uncaused, who is God.

If we wish to be assured that this cause is not only a
voluntary cause but a benevolent one as well, we make
a premise of the good which as experienced in the
world is our natural type of goodness; and we find that
the intender of this is good even as the result is good.

But by these means we do not find God. If we
could prove a first and conscious cause, still we could
prove only such cause as is equivalent to his effect; we
could prove only such goodness as is equivalent to this
mixture of goodness and evil that we here find. A very
limited Being would this be, a God who is only as great
as his world, only as good, and finally only as real.

By such ways we can only reach a being in whom the
qualities of experience are refunded, without change or
heightening. But in such case, we may as well believe
in the world as we find it ; and proceed with our work
of mastering it, without reference to God.

Such proofs are not wholly true to the spirit of reli-
gion ; for historically men have lifted their minds to God
rather because the world is unsatisfactory, than because
it satisfies. We wish a God who is greater than the

306 BLOW MEN KNOW GOD

world, also better than the world as found, and also
more real.

And such more perfect being is what these proofs have
in spirit sought : for in referring the world to a conscious
Will, they have meant to imply that Will is greater than
Nature ; and in making the world dependent upon a di-
vine Purpose they have intended to show that the Good
is more real than the evil, and will vindicate itself. But
clearly no such results can be gained by taking Nature
as a standard and moving toward God by relations of
causality or purpose : these relations can rise no higher
than their source. It is the denial of that assumed
starting-point that is the intellectual heart of religion.

On the other hand, we cannot dispense with the world
as a point of beginning for the reasons given. What
other way, then, can be found of relating this world to
God ? Follow the history of religion. Observe the
Mind dissatisfied with its world. Note the criticism
which it makes of Nature, as less than self-sufficient,
less than all-good, less than real. And note that of
a sudden it has claimed to possess the self-sufficient,
the good, the real. What has occurred to the mind
of man ?

It may seem as though that with which man had been
criticizing his experience, namely, his idea of a better
and more real, had in a moment taken on objective shape
to him. His dissatisfaction with his world has implied
a conception of a world not thus defective, and this con-
ception has been set up as substantial fact, in his idea of
God. He has turned his idea into a reality ; or he has
instinctively assigned a reality to his idea, yet without
blurring the features of his actual world. It is some

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 307

leap from idea to reality that constitutes the essential
historic movement of the mind to God.

Now it is just this leap from idea to reality that dis-
tinguishes an ancient proof of God's existence; a proof
which has become known as the ** ontological argument,"
the argument which assigns a real or ontological value to
an idea. I have an idea of God : therefore God exists.

In general, the circumstance that I have an idea of an
object is the emptiest of reasons for supposing that object
to exist. Whatever force such reasoning can have must
depend on some peculiarities of the idea of God, not found
in ideas or ideals generally. It must be shown, as
we tried to show of the idea of Other Mind, that this
idea has something unique about it which forbids the
supposition that it is a " mere idea." This, with various
degrees of success, have the thinkers who resort to the
ontological argument — from Augustine and Anselm
to Hegel and Royce — tried to do. It is always with
some incredulity that we meet the assertion that any
idea of ours carries with it its own guarantee of reality*
Yet this same ontological argument is the only one which
is wholly faithful to the history, the anthropology, of
religion. It is the only proof of God*

Although an idea which should carry on its face an
assurance of reality must have something unique about
it, we are not without analogies which may help to
interpret this extraordinary type of argument. The idea
of God is not the only one of our ideas which seems to
convey an assurance of objectivity. My idea of space,
for example, I incline to regard as real. Of my idea of
causality, I can hardly think that it is an idea only, a

308 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

form of relating events without an objective counterpart.
So also with the heauty of things, or their goodness ;
I know that these are ideas of mine, and yet as I regard
these qualities valid for other viewers of the same objects,
I attribute these qualities to the objects. Instinctively
also we project beyond ourselves, or repudiate in some
way as not our own, whatever in idea is new, whatever
is sublime and holy, whatever is obligatory, whatever
strikes me with a consciousness of my self as a lesser
thing. Even self-consciousness seems to come, at times,
as a revelation from beyond myself. It is not without
precedent, then, that an idea should convey with itself
some apparent title to reality : it is not impossible that
some idea, as perchance the idea of God, should be able
to make this title good.

Let us examine this movement of thought more
nearly. Nature must early have appeared to man as
somewhat less than real — else those early speculations
with regard to a creator or maker would hardly have
occurred to him. At the root of all these awkward
conceptions regarding clay-shaping or egg-laying or
spewing or magic-word-pronouncing deities lies an
uneasy persuasion that the things of physical existence
are subject to something; and to something of the
quality of human spirit. If Nature ever wore to early
man that aspect which seems primary to us — the
aspect of self-sufficiency, it must have gone hand in hand
with a quite contrary aspect — that of being illusory,
also possible to us, though with some effort.

We may find that illusory aspect by such consid-
erations as these: The appearance of self-sufficiency
belongs not more to Nature as a whole than to each thing

THE ONTOLOGTCAL ARGUMENT 309

in Nature. By that same view which shows us Naturt
as there in its own right, is also each thing there in
its own right. But with regard to the several things
in Nature we know that this appearance is not true*
The apparent self-sufficiency of single things if real
would make the World an aggregate in which every
thing went its own way without regard to another : self*
sufficiency of the parts is equivalent to acddentality.
Each thing is in reality infinitely dependent on all
the rest. But with the banishment of self-sufficiency
in the parts, there is no retaining of it in the Whole :
there is nothing in which this infinite dependence of
part on part comes to rest, unless I conceive the whole
thing as dependent on my Self, dream-fashion, — deriv-
ing its reality, so to speak, from the center outward^
rather than from inaccessible infinitely distant world-
borders and beginnings inward. The world is real I
now say simply as my experience — a not-unheard-of
point of view. The self-sufficient world of Nature
has suddenly become an illusion.

Yet I cannot rest here ; because I know that I am
not the source of the reality of Nature. True, if I am
not real, nothing is real: something in my conception
of reality starts from me; and all my objects become
real, as by infection from that. But true it is, likewise,
that unless Nature is real, nothing is real: something
in my conception of reality is borne in upon me from
beyond. I am real, in part, by virtue of what is not-
myself. The real must partake of the qualities of
myself and of Nature; and must be other than either.

Through this experience of cognitive restlessness (or
a dialectic ") early man, to whom the illusory side of

310 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

Nature was more f amiliar probably than to us, may have
passed in his own readier way ; he finds as his resting
place the real as Creative Spirit. Nature settles into
its third stage of regard : it is neither self -sufficient nor
illusory ; it has derivative reality. As over against me,
it is real; as over against the Creative Spirit, it is not
real. But how is this conception hit upon ? May it
be that this thought of Nature as dependent on Spirit
is some quick embodiment of an elusive but genuine
experience ? This idea of a creator does indeed quickly
float away from any experience it may have sprung from;
becoming promptly materialized and set in the sky as
part of the world-created — removed from that World,
yet all too much involved in it. Yet may it be that this
idea is one which must have reality?

Must it not be so ? For one thing I cannot by any
means escape : namely, that reality itself is present to
me in experience ; and all of this process of judging
this and that thing to be unreal or less than real is made
possible simply by the grasp of that reality which at
any moment I have. My negations are made possible
by my one secure position; and as my hold on reality
is variable, so my ability to see through the various
pretenders-to-reality to reality itself will vary. Nature
can only appear to me as illusory in some moment of
unusual clearness of perception ; for ordinarily the pre-
tence of nature to be self-sufficient is a harmless and
even useful simplification of my view. So if my own
existence is recognized by me in some moment as a
partial and dependent existence, that recognition is a
moment of "illumination," in which the relation of my
self to what is beyond my self becomes presently dis-

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 311

tinct: and in grasping this relation, I am catching some
fleeting glimpse of the terms between which the rela-
tion exists. I am experiencing that which is beyond
myself in no wise differently than in that moment I am
experiencing myself: and my judgment of dependence
is made possible by a positive and present knowledge of
that upon which I depend.

If, then, I discover that my world of nature and self,
taken severally or together, falls short of reality, this dis-
covery is due to what I know of reality — not abstractly,
but in experience. If I judge this system of nature-and-
self to be non-self-sufficient, it is by a knowledge of the
self-sufficient ; if I condemn, it is by virtue of something
in my possession not subject to condemnation; if I crit-
icize and correct, it is by comparison with or reference
to some present object not subject to criticism and cor-
rection. When I perceive myself in this curious rela-
tion to the world of physical facts — superior and not
superior, creative and unable to create — that play of
unrest is due to, and is defining, a simultaneous percep-
tion of the object to which this unrest does not apply.
The positive content which I give to that absolute object
is a report of experience ; whatever idea I make of it is
an idea derived nowhere but from that experience. If
I am able to frame a tenable conception of nature in
dependence upon a creative spirit not myself, that con-
ception is true ; for my idea can set me outside of nature
only as in experience I have already broken away from
the spell of the natural world. In whatever sense, then,
I am able to conceive nature as dependent upon spirit,
in that sense nature is dependent upon spirit. This idea
carries its reality with it.

312 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

It is impossible that my idea should be a "mere"
idea, for it is only possible for me to take this stand-
point, external to nature and myself, in idea in so far as
I do at the same time take it in experience also* And
that this experience of a more valid reality than that of
nature is truly described as an experience of other mind,
we have in our previous chapter sufficiently dwelt upon.
The ontological argument may be regarded as a logi-
cal epitome of what we there, in our own independent
research, came upon.1 The ontological argument, in its
true form, is a report of experience.

i

1 If we wished, in briefest compass, to state the antith-
esis between the ontological argument and other argu-
ments for the existence of a God, we might put the
situation thus :

These other arguments reason that because the worlce
is- God is. The ontological argument reasons thai
because the world is not, God is. It is not from ths
world as a stable premise that we can proceed to God
as a conclusion : it is rather when the world ceases to
satisfy us as a premise, and appears as a conclusion from
something more substantial, that we find God — pro-
ceeding then from the world as a conclusion to God as
a premise. We have no other premise to begin with : no
proof of God can be deductive. It is because neither my
world nor myself can serve as a foundation for thought
and action that I must grope for a deeper foundation.

1 Here the abstract argument of a former part of the book (ch. xii)
maintaining the need of religion for basis in an independent reality, begins
to receive its concrete filling. I may again refer the reader for further
illustration of this logical situation to the appended essay on " The Knowl-
edge of Independent Reality."

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT 313

And what I learn in this groping is, that my conscious-
ness of those defects will reveal, though in faintest de-
gree, the positive object which is free therefrom. It is
because we cannot infer from nature to God along causal
or other natural lines, and only because of this, that the
idea of God implies existence.

It is not every historical form of theontological argu-
ment that has expressed this experience : and not
every form of it appears to me valid. It does not seem
to me that any abstract idea of an " all-perfect being "
must necessarily be real. Nor does it seem to me that
we are justified in inferring from any idea to its reality
unless that reality can be present to the idea in experi-
ence. No form of the argument can be valid which finds
God at the level of thought only, and not at the level of
sensation. We are only justified in attributing reality
to an idea if reality is already present in the discovery of
the idea. When in our search for reality we fix atten-
tion upon Nature, it is because we already know that
whatever reality is, it cannot be out of connection with
that world of Nature-experience : and when we judge
Nature unreal, it is only as we discover at the same time
in concrete way how Nature is related to the Real. I
can infer from that idea by which I criticize Nature to
the reality of that idea only because I know Nature (and
Self) to contain some characters of reality that cannot
be omitted, or left behind. My real must already be
given, in order that my idea may be found real. The
true idea of God is not one which can leave out either
Nature or myself ; if my idea of God is real, it is real
in experience. Hence I have preferred to state the

314 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

argument not thus : I have an idea of God, therefore
God exists. But rather thus : I have an idea of God,
therefore I have an experience of God.

Eeality can only be proved by the ontological argu-
ment; and conversely, the ontological argument can only
be applied to reality. But in so far as reality dwells in
Self, or Other Mind, or Nature, an ontological argu-
ment may be stated in proof of their existence. Thus,
the Cartesian certitude may with greater validity be put
into this form :

I think myself, therefore I exist; or

I have an idea of Self, Self exists.
For in thinking myself I find myself in experience and
thus in living relation to that reality which experience
presents. So may it be with Nature :

I have an idea of physical Nature, Nature exists.
That is, in whatever sense I conceive Nature, in that
sense physical nature is real. Idealism has wavered
much in its judgment regarding the reality of Nature,
and of u material substance." It has said that we have
no idea of matter ; and again it has said that matter
does not exist, which implies that we have an idea of it.
Some meaning, however, we do attribute to the word
matter; and without enquiring what that definable mean-
ing may be, we may say in advance that whatever idea
is framable corresponds to reality as experienced. We
need not fear that this realism of Nature will detach
Nature from God; though if we could think it so
detached it would doubtless so exist. For of independ-
ence also, in whatever sense I can think the independ-
ence of beings, in that sense independence obtains
between them. That which is most independent of me,

THE ONTOLOaiCAL ARGUMENT 315

namely the Other Mind, has been the first object of our
ontological findings. The object of certain knowledge
has this threefold structure, Self, Nature, and Other
Mind; and God, the appropriate object of ontological
proof, includes these three.

And is not, after all, this same ancient ontological
argument the great and timely necessity for man in
all his thinking? That which permanently threatens
all our thinking is the damning commentary, "mere
thought" — our own commentary on our own work,
especially upon our own religion. Escape from illu-
sion is what we require, whether in dealing with God or
man or nature ; escape from phantasmal intercourse, from
subjective prisons from whose walls words and prayers
rebound without outer effect. Idea we must have if we
think; but an adequate realism for our idea we must
also have. We shall never be too fully assured that
our idea has reached beyond ourself , and has its ground
in that which is not ourself.

Any reflection that can infallibly break the walls of
the Self, opens up at once an infinite World-field. Set
a second to my One, and I have given all the numbers.
A single point outside the circle of " Bewusstseins-
immanenz" and I am free to open myself to all reality
and to all men. It is this point that the ontological
argument aims to put into our possession ; the reflection
which this argument embodies is the only, and wholly
simple, defence against our besetting subjectivity. " Be-
think thyself of the ground whereon thon standest. By
what idea hast thou judged thy thought to be illusion,
and mere subjectivity ? Is it not by an idea of some-

316 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

thing wholly actual and immediate ? Is not that Real-
ity thy own present possession?"

This present actuality of experience, " pure experi-
ence," finds me in living relation with that which is
most utterly not-myself . Here, in the immediate, is my
absolute escape from immediacy. Here in the given
present is my escape from myself, my window opening
upon infinity, my exit into God. Religion thus becomes
the concrete bond between men ; for he who has con-
sciously found his way to God, has found his way to
man also.

Thus it is that idea may give back the reality of
which idea is forever robbing us ; for while idea is the
greatest enemy of the actual, it is only through idea
that idea can be held firmly to its compelling and con-
trolling object, the real as found in experience.

CHAPTER XXHI

DEVELOPMENT OF THE KNOWLEDGE OP GOD

MAN knows well that he is not alone : he does not
so well know in what companionship he is. The
knowledge of the presence of spirit beyond self is no
conjecture; nor does this social experience ever arise.
Man's world is from the first a living world, even a
divine world; and primitive animism is in so far no
mere theory, but a report of certain and intimate expe-
rience. There are no dead things in that early world
of swarming spirits.

But this, we think, is at once its glory and its chief
defect. The idea of Other Mind is applied too indis-
criminately, and in too petty a fashion. The conception
of the inanimate is one we have had to work for. The
growth of social intelligence is in the direction of clear-
ing away the exuberance of animce, of charting certain
large tracts of Nature which wemay regard as uninhabited,
and hence subject to unlimited remorseless exploitation.
We require — not so much for free movement as for
free-hearted movement — a belief in the dead: we need
to know Nature as very largely environment, and very
little body-of-Mind; we need to regard the phenomena
of physical fact for the most part as essentially the
world of objects, of things intended rather than of
intentions, mine of meanings to be dug out, veil of
osmosis between humanity and Creative Spirit gener-

318 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

ally — having no intrinsic claim on deference for its
own sake.

We find it even now hard enough to decide, as we
pass down the scale of organisms and therefrom into
the inorganic world, where animation ceases — or whether
it ceases. Even of such conquests as we have made,
our sense of continuity — and doctrines of panpsychism
— are willing to deprive us. It is hard to conceive that
the livingness of micro-organisms is to be traced back-
ward, not to the atoms and molecules which have been
synthesized in their protoplasm/ but to the whole liv-
ing world itself. Yet this way lies progress. Not all
the world is body; not every unit our fancy outlines as
One Thing is the metaphor of an individual spirit. Our
animistic world must be clarified, and its life concen-
trated in more definite foci; gaining at once in meaning
and in character.

This is, I suppose, the sense of the advance by which
man gets himself gods in place of spirits only. Spirits
are mere flashes of divine life breaking out here and
there, spot-wise, in Nature and in human event, as we
have seen. They float with the stream of event, pass
with the event, are numerous as the events are numerous,
have no persistent individuality, are remembered only
as a shock or an excitement is remembered, take alto-
gether the character of the historic medium in which
they are found. There are no gods here. Nor can there
be gods until man in some way begins to think. He
must get his world into more general unities by clas-
sifying and speculating: he must see similarities in the
forces of light and storm and sea, in the life-producing
1 See for example Verworn, Protistenstudien*

DEVELOPMENT OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 319

agencies of plant and animal and man; and, perhaps
with the division of labor in his own societies, he must
conceive the functions of the spirits, and assign a recur-
ring though intermittent function (healing, or luck
of chase, or boundary-protection, or sending of sons)
to a special, or at least continuous, spiritual agency.
Thus arise functional deities, and causal deities, and
deities presiding over the three or four great spheres
of Nature, heaven, earth, sky, water; and even deities
of species — as of tree-life in general or of fox-life or of
eagle-life, deities which pass from one fox or eagle to
another on the death or sacrifice of the one, from the
whole of a field to its last sheaf as the harvesting
progresses, and then — reappear next year in the next
crop. All these take the place of the fitful spirits of par-
ticular objects and events, not without aid from all the
agencies of man's growing culture which are fostering
this thinking process; and man finds himself supplied
with gods.

But there is one other character of a god, lacking
to spirits, beside these of continuous individuality, wide
scope, and definite function or group of functions. The
god is addressed: men use toward the god the vocative
case; use "Thou" and not only "It" or "He." The
god having a continuous character may also support a
definite relationship, even an institution of intercourse
In gaining a more general scope, the god has loosened
his attachment to particular physical objects; but he
never completely detaches himself from the tangible:
he resides, perhaps voluntarily, in some special place or
thing — and this relic and clue to the god, seems to
serve as the means of approach, physical and mental.

320 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

Through his holy place, his temple, his pillar, his image,
his altar, his ark, the spirit becomes an historic god,
worshipable by an historic people in definite institu-
tional ways.

Herewith the way is opened for a new method of
progress in divine knowledge, — the method of experi-
ment: the god's dealings with his worshippers become
matter of record in tradition : and slow as men are to
learn new things about deity, or to give up old ones, there
is a wholly verifiable process of elimination and survival
of ideas about God, predicates of God, in religions which
have attained the historic stage. With the acquisition
of a god in place of a spirit, the knowledge of God
becomes a matter of tribal, national, racial experience.

It is not my intention here to follow the history of
the growth of the idea of God, even if that were possi-
ble. I wish to consider only some of the principles
involved in this growth and a few of its directions.

It is a curious paradox that this most original and
constant knowledge should be the one most and longest
subject to change, the most ancient subject of human
experimentation, the most encumbered with rubbish
and error. We understand in part the reasons for these
errors. We understand that it is not natural for man
to reflect, becoming fully aware of that with which he
is thinking. We understand that we have little or no
native power of recognizing either self or God apart
from mediators : so that in the conceptions we make
of God there must always be an overburden and over-
influence of the medium, physical or personal, wherein
God is thought.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 321

Still, we have not to read the development of religious
thought as a progress from error to truth. We must
read it as a progress of growing acquaintance, adding
to ideas which from the first have been true within their
own intention. Early man thinks of God, no doubt,
more truly than he is able to say or hand down in lan-
guage ; and we cannot forget that it is his infallible
identification of God in experience which enables him
from time to time to correct his straying conceptions.
After all, there is no other essential error in thinking
of God than this : that God becomes an object among
other objects, natural or psychical. And this is not all
error. For not only do these over- materialized concep-
tions hold fast the genuine objectivity of God (which
all-important character is usually weakened by attempts
to think of God as pure spirit) ; but further, there is
indispensable truth in the tendency to incarnate God in
his works, and to think of him as there where his activ-
ity is, and where his objects are* I would rather have
a worshipper of a thousand idols than a worshipper of a
subjective deity or of an abstraction.

What a man begins with in knowing God is truth.
He adds to this, further truth and an admixture of
error and earth. The elimination of this error by fur-
ther experience does at the same time develop the truth
still farther. The growth in the knowledge of God is
a growth of predicates. Every mediator gives some
quality or predicate to the experience of God. The
early mediation of God-knowledge is fragmentary and
occasional, albeit cumulative: but with progress further
aspects of experience, social, political, moral, concerns
of theory and art, acquire reference to the conscious-

322 HOW MEN KNOW GOB

ness of God, until it becomes a postulate of religion
that God is to be seen in everything, even in evil. As
many mediators, so many predicates ; and doubtless so
many problems also. For a predicate is, in general,
nearly as false as it is true ; and the accumulation of
religious knowledge is no simple sum of positive con-
tributions. Yet given the infallible identity of the
subject-matter, the growth of this knowledge is not in
principle unlike that of all knowledge.

There is one peculiarity, however, that deserves men*
tion. I have said that these predicates of God are,
each one of them, nearly as false as true; always in
need of being balanced by a predicate of opposite or
contrasting name.1 God is person and no-person ; lov-

1 Among the psychological reasons for the inadequacy of any given
predicate is this : that as such predicates arise in experience their most
emphatic elements are their negations. They are surer of what they
deny than of what they affirm; and should be read in the light of these
denials. Those occasions which early excite the specifically religious-
turn of reflection are occasions, as we can now see, when some incongruity
is felt in applying the usual habits of thought. Thus in the event of a
birth. The insistent naturalism of the birth process clashes hard against
man's pride and spiritual self-consciousness. There is unfailingly roused
some doubt of Nature, some wonder ending in a denial in which flesh is
reduced from a finality to a symbol. The reality of the birth, so we assert,
is something other and more than its physiology; and this something
other is able to confer dignity and awe on that event. All this, which
here takes the form of an inference, is in fact a direct report of the feel-
ings that here, though with greater struggle than usual, the spirit alone
is real and essential, not deserting nor despising but interpreting the
material. So with other propitious and unpropitious aspects of experience,
with disease, and death, and marriage, and wherever the course of events
most surely and elementally strikes religious fire • the same sense of
incongruity and conflict will be found. And in all this man is naturally
more aware of the cheekage, the emotion, the disturbance in self-con*
sciousness, than he can be of that by which the habits of his thought are
being checked (on the one hand) and maintained (on the other), — his

DEVELOPMENT OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 323

ing and non-loving ; fighter and no fighter; just and
yet alike to all ; merciful and unbending. The positive
and tenable value of any predicate, subject to such sub-
tractions, is problematic. God appears as a being in
whom opposite traits are strangely united: but the
nature of the center in which such oppositions agree,
or are neutralized, is not picturable — is known, if at
all, only to immediate experience. As an object in the
world of objects, God is next to nothing ; so the mys-
tics have always truly said. Hence atheism is truer
than many a florid religiosity whose God is but a sur-
feited agglomerate of laudatory epithets. Atheism is
the proper purgative for this kind of religion ; and has
been historically an indispensable agency in deepening
and keeping sound the knowledge of God.

But atheism discards the one hopeful element in the
situation, — namely, that God may actually furnish the
solution of these dilemmas; which are never problems
about God alone, but are at the same time threatened split-
tings in the world of human idea and ideal. For man,
as a thing of Nature, is a being of opposing instincts,
whose balance becomes increasingly fine ; and only in the
increasing security of hold upon some Absolute, such
as sanctions both the one and the other of the diver-
gent ideals, can his tottering balance be kept. With
his God, as a god of opposing predicates, this growing
instability of human nature becomes a condition of

ultimate consciousness of God. He is moved, but he does not see clearly
of what idea his feeling is the work. He reports his experience, there'
fore, in the form of dogma ; adopting snch positive objects as he can
distinguish and judge appropriate to his feeling. Hence his dogma is
permanently subject to the elimination of whatever is extraneous in the
assumed objects.

3.24 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

speed in his forward movement. Thus, in more senses
than one, is God the pledge of the unity of human
nature. It is by holding vigorously to the identity of
the ultimate Object of experience that the antitheses in
the judgments about God (and about man) do in time
get their positive solution. But let us consider some
of these antitheses.

One elementary antithesis in the thought of God is
that between the one and the many ; between polytheism
and monotheism. This is a primitive antithesis, but
also a permanent one : for every other antithesis has
some bearing on this one, — as, for example, that be-
tween the personal and the impersonal. God as per-
sonal inclines to be many, since the personal being
seems to have outline, and to need external relations
to other persons : even in Christianity the persons of
God are three, whereas the Godhead which is one is
relatively neuter.

The development of religion has been, in the main,
in the direction of unifying the heavens, a continuation
of the movement from spirit to the god. But there
is a current in the opposite direction also. The god-
meaning has always been single ; that is, spirits have
always been known as belonging to the genus divine,
supernatural. And this belonging to the one genus
has frequently meant, even for very primitive thinkers,
a participation in one pervasive world-energy.1 Behind
the numerous gods we can usually discover a more
general divinity, vaguer but also more exalted, and

1 See Arthur 0. Lovejoy. The Fundamental Concept of the Priml
tive Philosophy.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 32S

often more ancient than the rest. Man has never been
in doubt that the qualities of God are such as can
belong only to one ; and even when he has many deities,
they are addressed in turn (for the most part) as the
all-powerf ul, the Lord of lords. A polytheism that is
not in some sense a henotheism is yet to be discovered.
The many gods have had their birth one by one, each
one in turn a god, — or rather an attempt at God. The
gods must grow in number because the first god-shapes
are too poor. Each god satisfies within the region of
his own group of events; seems hero and superlative
enough in his own province. But another province
requires another figure of God. Hence we may say
that polytheisms are galleries of aborted monotheisms ;
collections of god-figures each of which well intends to
be all, but is incompetent. There is no such thing in
history as a primitive monotheism ; but there is a per-
manent singleness in the thought of deity which man
forever departs from, through loyalty to the variety of
deity's manifestations.

Polytheism then has its right; its richness; its
acknowledgment of the omnipresence of deity. It is
truer than many a monotheism. Premature monothe-
isms have invariably been too poor. Witness the sad-
fated monotheistic moment of Egypt; the sun-disk god
of Amenophis IV. Witness those other royal mono-
theisms in Peru and Mexico. There was memorable
reasoning in that speech of the Inca in religious con-
clave, worthy of being transmitted from times long
prior to the Spanish discovery : " We are told, he said,
that the Sun has made all things. But this cannot be j
for many things happen when he is absent. He behaves

326 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

neither like a living thing, — for he never tires; nor
like a free thing, — for he never varies his path. There-
fore the sun must have his master, greater than he;
which greater god we ought to worship." Yet it was
not the destiny of this greater god, nor of the greater
gods of Persia nor of India to attain sway over the
religious sense of man. Pantheism goes farther, is
able to dissolve and absorb the many partial deities ; but
pantheism also is a unity still too poor and quantitative,
breaking out everywhere in assertions wholly polytheis-
tic, "This thing is god, — and that, and that." It is
long before monotheism can be true for man's concep-
tion. It cannot be true until after much free growth of
the God-idea (in which each new element in the concep-
tion of God may appear as the birth of a new deity), God
•can be known in experience as the one o/all these many.

Another antithesis is that between God as near and
God as remote ; an antithesis which has taken technical
shape as that between the transcendence and the imma-
nence of God. This also is associated with the contrast
between the personal and the impersonal. For the god
who is near is apt to be thought of as sympathetic, and
so far like mankind ; the remote god is thought of for
the most part as unlike and impersonal. In the logic
of the Inca reformer above quoted, the deity in becom-
ing one became at the same time more remote and less
personal : his temple near Callao held no images, and
witnessed no sacrifices.

Here again the direction of religious progress is not
single, but twofold. We have heard much in recent
years of the advantages of the immanent God; and I

DEVELOPMENT OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 327

have nothing to say in doubt of these advantages —
they are the modern form of the more omnipresent and
polytheistic aspects of religion. But they are fatal
advantages if they lose from sight that other direction
of progress, notable from the earliest, the retreat of God.
Religion may be too romantic, too much interested in
what is not here but beyond somewhere in the ineffable;
yet religion if it lives chiefly in the next things will
turn out to be no religion at all. In proportion as the
religious horizon is drawn close, the gamut of religious
experience becomes trivial.

Early gods are like man and near him. But still,
they were as unlike and as remote as he could imagine
them. The differences between spirits and men, the gulf
fixed between the natural and the supernatural — gulf
leaped in death — the exaggerations and superlatives,
these are as important parts of the conception as are
the likenesses and the simplicities of intercourse. When
man can think beyond the sun, and beyond the sky, —
there God goes, and probably first goes. For the God-
idea, as the limiting idea of man, is also his explorative
idea : by dwelling in speculative fancy on that which
is beyond what he has yet thought, man prepares the
next conceptual conquests — wins at length one more
idea of which he must say, God is not that. We need
not fear that God will be thrust out of consciousness
by this effort to assign him ultimate otherness; for
God-thinking can not well expel God from thought. On
the contrary the work done, and the potential acquired,
by dint of such endless series of negations, is a most
practical measure of the worth of that conception for
the lives of the thinkers.

328 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

For we do not find that the greatness of man and
the importance of human business are in proportion to
the restriction of man's outlook, but the reverse. The
present day has its supreme worth, every present moment
is the measure of all the rest : but this is so, in the
main, because every present day is " the conflux of two
eternities," which eternities being eliminated the worth
disappears also. We have outgrown the days when
we make the citizen great by making the government
small ; we shall outgrow the days when we make man
great by making God small and useful.

The apostle of the present moment depends for his
persuasiveness upon his skilful use of the remote. The
charm of Omar is wholly dependent upon his vision of
the long reaches of destiny in which that moment is
framed, and which none knows how to invoke more
finely than Omar himself. It is the thought of the
Seven Seas which makes the plash of the pebble a mel-
ancholy marvel : and it is the vista of the long human
caravan, with a delicate loyalty to its shadowy figures
as they vanish, which lifts Omar's own moment from
the level of the sensual into the atmosphere of alluring
poetic worth. It is that remote thing with which we
think the present that gives value to the present. And
in this same way, and quite unconsciously for the most
part, the remote God-thought of the Orient (where the
sublimity and romance of religion are native-air) has
served through centuries to preserve from utter desola-
tion the value-element in millions of careers which to
our eyes are inconceivably monotonous and intolerable.

The near-by deity of a religion that betones imma-
nence proves in experience to be a baffling object of

DEVELOPMENT OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 329

worship. Paradoxically enough he is not so accessible
as the unreachable God. If we look through the history
of religion for instances of genuine intimacy between the
worshipper and his god, we do not light upon sorcerers
generally and their " familiar" spirits, nor upon the
relation between the human Greek and his human Zeus.
There could be no intimacy here, simply because this
Zeus was all too near and all too human. Such deities
have descended too far into the current of the world in
which all things and all spirits are insulated one from
another. We might more probably think of the Persian
Mazdeans, between whom and their Ahura there was a
tie of remarkable intensity : and yet Ahura Mazda even
more than the god of the Jews was a being of remote
and transcendent nature. The explanation of the
paradox seems to be this : that the effort to think God
must first differentiate God from our other objects.
But we also are in a different world from that of any
of our World-objects : something in us is foreign and
transcendent to all that we view. There could be no
absolute rapprochement between the heart of this alien-
within-the-world which we call Self and its God, unless
that God were also in some way alien to that same
realm. Worship must be always in some measure, as
Plotinus puts it, a flight of the Alone to the Alone.

The religion of Brahm is the historic demonstration
of this truth, in the abstract. For these Brahman
pietists who most clearly recognized and defined the
otherness of God from all things phenomenal and even
conceivable were the ones who first asserted (so far
as history knows) the immediate unity between the
ineffable without and the ineffable within.

330 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

Upon this point of the remoteness of God as object
we have much to relearn that the Orient has neve*
forgotten. We have God the Son, as they had not •
there is little danger that we shall lose the perception
of the divinity of the Life within Nature and Man and
Present Affairs. But while God the Son may now have
become our necessary way to practical union with the
Father, yet the Father must first be known before the
Son is recognized as God. Without the Father, the
Son is a mere man : for the incarnate is always bound
and infected by the finite thing it touches. Until the
human spirit knows the self that is more at home in the
infinite than here among Things, it has not yet found
its Self nor its God. Only the transcendent God can
be truly immanent. This also is a matter of experience.

One of the most striking stages in the development
of religion is the epoch when religion adopts morals as
its own province, and when the gods of religion take on
ethical character. This is so distinctive an advance
from earlier amoral thoughts of God, which present
him simply in terms of nature-powers, quite as likely to
be evil as good, that most classifications of historic
religions (Tiele's especially) mark off in some way the
"ethical religions" from the earlier as merely " natural-
istic" or "objective/' How do the judgments arise
that God is good, or that he is moral ? Is it not rather
that he is found favoring the good of men and the
right of men, than that he is himself good or moral in
any sense in which we attribute these terms to each
other ? Immoral or malevolent, God cannot be ; but
there is a struggle in our thought of God between the

DEVELOPMENT OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 331

God that is described by our ideal predicates, and that
God who rejects all these as something less and other
than the truth. And here again, we can see at once
that the problem of personality and impersonality is
involved.

It is pertinent to call attention to the fact that the
God who merely is, as our Absolute Other, is by that
fact both promotive of our weal and of our morality,
This has been one of our cardinal doctrines. In our
discussion of the need of God we showed in some detail
how the mere presence of a companion Mind, standing
outside the arena of human effort with its contrasts of
good and evil, may be found, in experience, to transmute
evil into good ; that while, by this very experience, the
companion would deserve the attribute of goodness, yet
this standing outside the arena itself is a necessary con-
dition of his being found all-powerful in this trans-
muting work. It is not otherwise with the morality
of God. Did not Jesus of Nazareth preach that new
conception of God's justice which so strongly resembles
an indifferent treatment of the righteous and the
unrighteous ? If God merely is, that existence of God
is a promotive of human morality. For what is the
essential morality of man if not this, that he make
himself universal, escaping in thought and act from his
self-enclosedness ? If God were but a point external
to man's consciousness, and if man could reach thai-/
point, his feat in doing so would be at least the begin-
ning of morality. The moral importance of God in
history has been chiefly dependent on the relations
which man has sustained to his gods : loyalty to a god
is a moral relation ; and when through loyal obedience

332 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

to a common god men become loyal to fellow-tribesmen
and their customs, that god is favoring morality among
men, quite apart from any mythical reputation he may
have. In finding God as simply existent we find him,
I say, both good and righteous in his activity j and the
condition for so finding him is that he himself remain
above the contrasts of good and evil.

There are then, we believe, no pre-ethical stages of
religion, though there are indeed pre-legalistic stages ;
there is no moment at which God in his totality begins
to be thought of as good, though there are great
moments in religious development when specific charac-
ters of God's goodness become clear, as of " mercy "
and " loving-kindness " ; and finally, there are no such
specific predicates of good that do not stand in need,
as we think of them, of being tempered with contrast-
ing qualities, such as justice and universality. The
God-idea must advance at times from the moral to
the amoral, as well as in the reverse direction. But
herewith the question of the moral attributes of God
debouches wholly into the question of God's personality.
This question we have variously encountered, and shall
now briefly touch upon for itself.

We have found God in the first place as an Other
Mind, an individual Subject, wholly active: and no
war of predicates can invade this certainty. But so
large are the differences between this Other Mind and
those with whom we commonly converse, that we do
continually recur to the query, How shall we think of
Him ? We are baffled and not foolishly by the absence
of a body that we can attribute to God j for here the

DEVELOPMENT OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 333

perfect metaphor of Nature seems to break — there
is no point of view which is God's in particular, and
the being that has every point of view loses to us all
semblance of individuality. " 0 that I knew where I
might find Him."

It is something to note that our body is the sign of
our limitation, and of our dependence. Our body is
that through which we are acted upon as well as that
through which we act. But our body is also that
through which we are found and become personally
present to other persons. The abolition of body is the
abolition of the recognizable and the understandable in
all personal relations.

And we see, too, that the advance of religion has
been very largely from personality to impersonality.
For most like ourselves are those early sonls, doubles,
shadows, which people the other world. Eeligion must
lose that literally human heaven, and its human gods,
and therewith vanish from grasp and from interest.
The alternative to the thought of God as person is the
thought of him as Substance, as Energy, and chiefly as
Law. Brahmanism, we may say, finds God as Substance,
the great That Which. Buddhism, often accused of
having no supreme god, sometimes described as the
godless religion, has also its Absolute : but its god is
the Law, the law of Karma, the fixed principle of justice
in the heart of all change. Karma is, as nearly as
possible, a "Moral Order of the Universe," in which
terms — though with quite other meaning — Fichte de-
scribed his deity. Emerson's " Spiritual Laws" which
are alive and which execute themselves, which are an-
other name for his Over-soul, are a deity of not unlike

334 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

character. The Greek Fate and Chaos, the Stoic mate-
rial Keason, the Chinese Tao : all such conceptions of
God, are they not the enlightened thoughts of men
about deity? Have we not said but lately that the re-
mote God is the primary necessity of religion?

We have said this ; and noted at that time that man
is not made great by diminishing the majesty of his
world. In the same spirit we may now say that man
is not aggrandized nor freed by weakening the type of
his world's unity. Just as we could not enhance our
own definiteness by blurring the definiteness of Nature,
but the contrary : so we should detract from our own
concreteness in any detraction from the concreteness of
our world-unity, and in our thought of it. There is
neither merit nor truth in rarefying the thought of God;
nor in presenting him to our conceptions in terms of
some thinner and weaker sort of world-unity easier to
image and believe in than a personal world-unity.

It is God in external relation to me, as my Other,
that seems the personal God ; it is God as the Whole,
including me within himself, that seems impersonal:
and the true God is the Whole, as in Christian doctrine
God is the One of the three persons. But we may dis-
cern in the world generally a principle to the effect that
inner relations assimilate themselves to outer rela-
tions, and conversely. Thus, of organisms, the whole
cares for the parts in the same sense that the parts may
be said to care for each other : and the several organs of
an organism do tend to reproduce in themselves the fea-
tures of that whole, becoming in themselves organisms
with internal relations resembling their own outward
relations. Of State and citizen the same holds: and

DEVELOPMENT OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 335

whatever the character of the State in its international
relations, that same character (be it of Athenian greed,
or of Machiavellian expediency, or of better sorts) will
reproduce itself in the character of the members of the
State. Now the State is in some measure an artificial
body, and its moral quality lags behind the qualities of
its members. But the World is not artificial: the char-
acter of the World is first, — that of its members de-
rivative. We may find our thought of God following
in arrear of the best conception we have of ourselves;
but it is only because we know that whatever selfhood
we have is an involution of the selfhood of the Whole,
and that our external relations to our fellows do but
follow and reproduce in their own more distant fashion
the relation of God to us which from his view is inter-
nal. Hence the remark that "Man is never long con-
tent to worship gods of moral character greatly inferior
to his own " l may be accepted, with its sting drawn,
because of what we know of our relation to the Whole
of which we are natural parts.

The conception of God as Law has its right in
destroying the poverty of my thought of personality.
I confess that this word "person" has for me a harsh
and rigid sound, smacking of the Eoman Code. I do
not love the word personality. I want whatever is
accidental and arbitrary and atomic and limited and
case-hardened about that conception to be persistently
beaten and broken by whatever of God I can see in the
living law and order of this Universe until it also has
all such totality and warmth.

But I see that personality is a stronger idea than law ;

* McDougalL Social Psychology, p. 311. 2d edition.

336 HOW MEN KNOW GOD

and has promise of mutuality and intercourse that laws,
even if living, cannot afford. I see further that person-
ality can include law, as law cannot include personality.
And I see, finally, that this deepening conception of
personality is not more an ideal than an experience.
For God is not falsely judged in experience to be both
the one and the other. The negation of any one such
attribute by the other is only for the enlargement of
the first, not for its destruction. Until I can perfectly
conceive personality, God must be for me alternately
person and law; with the knowledge that these two
attributes of one being are not, in truth, inconsistent,
and that their mode of union is also something that I
shall verify in some moment of present knowledge, as by
anticipation of an ultimate attainment. Not only is God
to be found in experience, but whatever attributes are
genuinely predicated of him are to be found there also.
God is the Eternal Substance, and is known as such;
God is also the Eternal Order of things : but God is
That Which does whatever Substance is found to do.
If it is the knowledge of God that first gives us our
human comradeship and its varied and satisfying respon-
siveness, the God who is the bearer of that responsiveness
is not himself without response. These comrades are in
a measure God's organs of response, even as Nature is
God's announcement of his presence and individuality :
but God has also a responsiveness of his own, and herein
lies the immediate experience of the personality of God.
The relations between man and God have, in the course
of religious history, become more deeply personal and
passionate, with the deepening sense of evil and spiritual
distress. The soul finds at length its divine companion.

DEVELOPMENT OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD 337

But as religion enters into these deeper and more fertile
strata of the knowledge of God, it becomes evident
that the development of religion falls increasingly upon
the shoulders of individual men, whose experience of
God and its cognitive content becomes authoritative for
others. We find that religion becomes universal at
the same time that it becomes most peculiarly personal,
and takes its impetus and name from individual founders
and prophets. Buddhism and Christianity and Islam
are religions of redemption and of universal propagan-
dism ; and it is they, chiefly, that willingly refer their
character and revelation of God to one person. Our
understanding of the higher stages of the knowledge
of God, so far as man has yet progressed in this knowl-
edge, will best be pursued in a closer study of mysticism
and worship.

PART V
WOESHEP AND THE MYSTICS

CHAPTER XXIV

THOUGHT AND WORSHIP

WORSHIP, or prayer, is the especial sphere of the
will in religion. It is an act of approach to
God : and while this act involves a lifting of thought
to God, it is more than an act of thought — it intends to
institute some communication or transaction with God
wherein will answers will.

What this transaction may signify it is not easy to
understand. Prayer is instinctive; and as with all
instinctive actions its motive lies deeper than any obvious
utility: our attempts at explanation are likely to leave
its ultimate meaning uncaught. The motive of worship
may seem to he moral — an impulse of deference to the
great and holy and a desire to share in that holiness ; or
we may think to discern an end more deliberatelyjprac&caZ,
as when prayer takes the form of propitiation or petition:
yet all such moral and practical motives are but appur-
tenances of the primary motive, which as yet we must
simply call religious — allowing its rightful uniqueness
and problematic character. Worship, we may say, is
governed by the " love of God " — whatever this mys-
terious phrase may mean. In so far as love seeks
knowledge of its object, worship resembles thinking : yet
love seeks its knowledge by its own way and method,
characteristically different from the way of reflection:
it is these differences which are now important to us.

342 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

For philosophy, in its rightful and necessary effort to
do justice to the religious idea in contrast to a religion
of feeling, is inclined to halt in the world of thought,
unable to see what more than thinking may be involved
in the act of prayer. Kecognizing that idea is neces-
sary, it assumes that deliberate reflection is sufficient.
It identifies Gottesdienst with Denken, and thereby
impoverishes the meaning of worship.

Worship is indeed a reasonable act, even when
instinctive and momentary : it is informed of God ; it
uses and contains all available knowledge of the being
whom it addresses. But in worship the universality of
thought is overcome ; and God is appropriated uniquely
to the individual self. Worship brings the experience
of God to pass in self-consciousness with a searching
valency not obligatory upon the pure thinker : in some
way it enacts the presence of God, sets God into the
will to work there. In the nature of the case, the
aspect of deity which reason discovers is an uncondi-
tional, inevitable, universal presence: from such a
presence there can be no escape — and so no drawing
near — save by the movements of deliberate attention.
But the drawing-near of worship is more than a
movement of attention.

Our philosophical thought finds God as an object —
in the third person, not in the second. Thinking comes
upon God in a contemplation which the sound of the
word " Thou " would break and startle. There is here
some spell of distance, some veil of insulation, from
which natural religion does not suffer. In worship, not
alone the universality, but also the objectivity proper to
deliberate thought must be accepted — and overcome.

THOUGHT AND WORSHIP 343

Our moral freedom consists in this, that in knowing
God we maintain a moment of reserve; the further
relation requires a further consent. And in the consent
which distinguishes the act of worship, objectivity, the
otherness of God and man, ceases to he the whole truth
of that relationship.

What this further element may be, we shall for the
present simply illustrate. We are well acquainted with
the difference between the observer of life and the
sharer of it. We know the man to whom nature, for
instance, is a foreign and independent spectacle, and
the man who in the presence of nature readily becomes
a part of all that is around him. We know the man who
in all social situations maintains some fine insulation,
some predominance of the self-preserving instinct; and
we know the man whose self spontaneously diffuses and
mingles with each situation by some natural osmosis
between him and his object. And we know further
that while the former temper has a certain advantage
in discoursing about its world, the latter temper though
less fluent in speech does win a kind of knowledge of
its world which the less adventurous and more objective
temper may wholly fail to understand. We experience
these varieties of temper in ourselves, and know well
that while this consent is sometimes in our power, at
other times even this touch of freedom which makes us
one with our object seems to have drifted beyond our
present grasp. And though this difference has cogni-
tive consequences, we are inclined to refer it at last to
an attitude of will, to a moral difference which in its
beginnings is under voluntary control. In any case we
recognize here an other-than-theoretical relation to our

344 WOBSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

object, a relation which surmounts objectivity without
destroying it, and which is seen quite simply in that
transition in consciousness from " he " to " thou," and
from "thou "to "we."

These two aspects of our living belong together. As
we have just now compared the two tempers — of isola-
tion from our objects and of fusion with them — we
recognize that neither would be significant without the
other. Distance without fusion becomes individualistic
and sterile; fusion without distance is formless, senti-
mental, and oppressive. We want our living to add to
its objectivity this unifying consent ; but we want no
consent save of one who in thought has made himself
free. Consent, and that union with the object so
curiously uncommandable by direct effort, flows through
and around all our deliberate thought-work, lifting and
floating it on the tide of a more central relationship
with our world. Eeflective thought, it appears, is too
purposive, active, self-distinguishing, self-preserving,
and at the same time too unindividual and unfree in
its result, to do justice to the meaning of worship.

The discrepancy between these two processes appears
most vividly when we consider their historical aspect.
If we identify the essence of worship with thinking,
then whatever else has been historically associated with
worship by way of external action, ceremonial form,
and the like, is set aside as accidental, as something
with which the man of thought may dispense, as some-
thing with which civilization itself will dispense in time.
From this point of view, historical worship has two ele-
ments: reflection (which is important) and rite (which

THOUGHT AND WORSHIP 345

is relatively unimportant), the merely practical aspect
of religion, making use of the knowledge of God but
adding nothing to it. These practices, as we now see,
are not only untheoretical — they are even peculiarly
unpractical : here is a great accretion of activities, not
turned outward into the world, but directed upward
and disappearing in their energies, like the fire of sacri-
fice, in an unanswered gesture of aspiration — unan-
swered, unexplained, though seemingly undiscouraged.
This external part of worship is the exclamatory or
demonstrative side of religion ; it is religion vaunting
itself, celebrating itself, decorating itself, — and in the
process of time these externalities, once pedagogically
or socially useful, become unnecessary.

But our historic conscience has been making us aware
that this line of cleavage between the important and the
unimportant in religion is badly drawn. It produces a
conception of religion which is in much danger of omit-
ting religion itself. For religion has always assumed
that there is something in particular to be done about
God ; and has identified itself with the work of doing
it. It has assembled religious practices into institu-
tions— systems of just such special activities; it has
spent itself in perfecting and establishing them ; and
what a spectacle do these structures constitute as they
heap themselves in history. What will our philosophies
make of this rank growth of deed, ceremony, orgy,
assembly, ritual, sacrifice, sacrament, observances pub-
lic and private of a thousand sorts? Is all this to be
left as an alien mass? are these performances and
experiences to be turned over chiefly to the student of
abnormal psychology? If in the presence of these

346 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

phenomena of religious practice our most lively sense
is a sense of the erratic, do we not thereby measure
the inadequacy of our understanding ? Must not the
mere bulk and persistence of this aspect of religion
convey some impression of importance ; and still more
so, the intensity of spirit with which it has been carried
on ? Our eliminations of the unimportant in religion
must mightily reduce this mass, no doubt ; but it will
not all be cut away from religion. Something which is
other than reflective thought will appear as an essential
ingredient of worship. And perhaps a rapid survey of
these historic phenomena may suggest what this essen-
tial ingredient is. We shall find religion, perhaps,
making its own selection.

There is no moment in the early history of religion
when this active, vocative side of worship is without its
own distinct importance, real or supposed. If man's
religion is first embodied in his exclamations, these
exclamations were at once cognitions and prayers, incip-
ient transactions. God-friendly and God-unfriendly
are distinguishable even here; and God-unfriendly can
be made God-friendly. What consequences may hang
from this practical issue of the friendliness of God is
not clear — early theories are no better than our own :
the imagination exhausts itself in picturing the divine
rewards and punishments ; but behind all these pictures
there is, even from the beginning, a residual import-
ance in being right with deity which we might call an
ontological importance, i.e., affecting somehow the
substance of one's self, the soul and its destiny, open-
ing up some bottomless depths of being such as the eye
is hardly fitted to gaze into. The amount of power

THOUGHT AND WORSHIP 347

that can be released when the religious nerve is pressed
is quite out of proportion to the belief in the more
definable pleasures and pains. Let political and legal
needs make the most of this superstitious potency while
it lasts. To keep God friendly there are few efforts
that men will not make, few privations that they will
not undergo. It is but a trifling symbol of such efforts
and privations that the god requires a deliberate and
methodical approach in sacrifices and prayer; whatever
importance religion has begins to concentrate in the
special act of worship.

But these necessary moments of approach have their
own terrors, when some one must take it upon him-
self to break through the habitual taboo of Holiness ;
a cloud of oppressive gravity deepens over the event,
supportable only by fierce resolution, wrapped probably
in mutilation and blood. And when the act is accom-
plished in safety, an exultancy equally fierce floods the
brain ; exhibitions of savage gaiety, the license of super-
men, can alone satisfy the spirit. We are strangers
now to this vehemence, whether for better or for worse;
but we can still catch from afar the pulse of this ancient
ocean, its terrors and its glorious liberations. We can
understand how this strange sense of ontological im-
portance must condense in any phase of human experi-
ence in which the actual remoteness of deity seemed
overcome. We shall expect it to set excessive value
upon those states of enthusiasm, ecstasy, intoxication,
in which heaven and earth were felt to flow together ;
and to raise into prominence persons specially apt
in the arts of worship, quite apart from any other
human capacity that these persons might have or lack.

348 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

Thus the system of worship develops its adepts,—-
its mystics.

Judging externally, from the qualities of dervishdom,
yoginism, devoteeship and sainthood generally, all these
special achievements of approach to God might he
regarded as the luxury or extravagance of the religious
consciousness, were it not that they have been regarded
by religion as in some form and degree its chief neces-
sity. Eeligion (which in any given people lives more or
less as a single body) seems to breathe chiefly through
the experience of individuals who carry to its highest
the art of personal worship : the Brahmin becomes holy
because the act of prayer (Brahman) is holy. The value
of the saint, to all appearances, must lie in the simple
fact that he knows how to communicate with God ; this
simple fact gives to his look, his gait, his way of judg-
ing events, the sentences that fall from his lips, an
unaccountable weight. Of substantial result not much
more can be extracted from these persons; not much
more has been demanded of them. Their art of dealing
with the god has been a matter of wonder not to the
people only, but to themselves as well ; they have diffi-
culty in communicating either that art or its significant
fruits to the religious public. They do not mix well,
these mystics : they must live as objects to the crowd,
solitary often, often in exclusive groups of like-minded
spirits, willing and able to accept from each other large
meanings on small suggestions, leaping to some substance
through a swirl of dizzy symbol. It is this difficulty of
communication, this separation from the mass in thought
and habit, this embarrassment of speech, which has
embodied itself in the word mysticism.

THOUGHT AND WORSHIP 349

The suspicion of unreality and o£ pious distemper
which this name must always bear is a monument, not
all unjust, to the vanity of those who first adopted it,
as if their esoteric knowledge and privilege with deity,
this circumstance of separation from the rest of men,
were the essence of their art, and wholly a matter for
congratulation. But it matters not to us if some or
even most prophets have been vain or false, if there
are any true prophets. In this, as in other great mat-
ters, nature makes a thousand failures to bring forth
one consummate product. The existence of the gen-
uine mystic — Bernard, Mohammed, Lao Tze, Plotinus,
Eckhart, John of the Cross — however seldom he is
found, is the momentous thing ; sufficient to command
respect for the tradition of mysticism, sufficient to jus-
tify the attention which through religious history has
been focussed upon these individuals.

For the mysteries and the mystics have in the course
of time distilled into their own tradition the essence of
religious practice. They know, if any know, how it is
that the knowledge of God can be the most universal
of perceptions, and at the same time the most rare and
difficult. They know wherein the act of prayer differs
from an act of reflective thought. A philosophy of
mysticism would be a philosophy of worship.

NOTE ON THE MEANING OF MYSTICISM1

WHEN we speak of mysticism we have now before our
mind a great historic phenomenon, found everywhere
that religion is found: for as there is no religion without
worship, so there is no religion without its specialists in
worship. And a survey of the modes of approach to God
practised by the mystics in all ages seems to confirm our
distinction between worship and the usual processes of
thought. In these strange courtings of frenzy, ecstasy,
intoxication; in these traps set for the inspiring deity,
preparations elaborate, demonstrative, fantastic, inhuman at
times, we see little external resemblance to the quieter
processes of reflection.

Yet, as the methods of devotion clarify; as excitement
learns its own due channels, finding assuagement in art and
ceremonial dignity ; and especially as worship recovers a right
to private as well as to public pursuit ; worship approximates
meditation, even externally. Worship takes on the aspect of
a more deliberate, intense, and thorough thinking. In thought
as in worship, I must to some extent remove myself from the
current of experience, from " appearances " ; I must stop the
intrusions of sense, and check the prepossessions of habitual
idea. Further, in thought as in worship, I must yield myself
to my object and identify my being for the time with its own.
Worship, then, is but the completion, is it not, of these par-
tial works of common thought? and true worship will issue
in true knowledge, as its essential result and aim. What

1 Readers whose eye may have fallen upon an article in Mind, Janu-
ary 1912, on "The meaning of mysticism as seen through its psychology/'
will perhaps recognize in this note and in some of the following chapters
disjecta membra of that article, much revised.

ON THE MEANING OF MYSTICISM 361

this knowledge is, the mystics will report as their peculiar
discovery.

Thus some of the greater mystics and schools of mysticism
have actually reduced worship back again to thinking, con-
templation, reflection ; and have represented the end of wor-
ship as a personal knowledge of God, or even as a doctrine
about God. To the Vedantist, thought becomes the true
sacrifice, equivalent to and replacing all other sacrifices. The
only art of the mystic is after all an art of knowing, difficult
perhaps, but not different in character from other thought.
Naturally, then, we might expect the doctrines of the mystics
to approach a common type ; and we might better identify
mysticism with its cognitive result than with any peculiar act
of will deserving the special name of worship. Such has
been, in fact, the fortune of mysticism: in so far as the
mystics have presented their results systematically they have
tended to a common type of metaphysical theory; and the
name mysticism has become attached to a well-known and
well-refuted doctrine about the nature of God, or of Eeality.
In the refutation of that doctrine the excuse for worship as
a peculiar esoteric art of thinking disappears, and practical
religion merges itself with philosophical thought.

Thus, when Eoyce writes of mysticism he treats it as one
of the four leading types of metaphysical system, identified
with the doctrine that reality is pure unity, the negation of all
appearances and pluralities, immediate therefore and ineffable.
Of this doctrine Eoyce exhibits the emptiness in wholly con-
clusive argument : speculative mysticism needs no more refu-
tation, and shall have none here. And we may the more
willingly refrain from further criticism since our own view of
reality which excludes that one is already before us.

But unquestionably we restrict our view of historical mysti-
cism in identifying it with this result : mysticism has been a
much broader thing than this type of metaphysics. Not all
mystics have been independent speculators ; and not all spec-
ulators among the mystics have conformed to this type. If

352 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

mysticism is found in all religions, it must be found avowing
every conceivable variety of metaphysics ; every variety, that
is, consistent with its one necessary postulate, that reality may
be, and ought to be, approached in worship. Christianity,
for instance, is the home of much mysticism, even of the best;
yet Christianity does not profess the " negative metaphysics " ;
it is the express foe of the " abstract universal," for its God
has once for all sanctioned the world of appearances by becom-
ing flesh and dwelling among us. Nor have the Christian
mystics as a body been at war with their creed. It is to be
presumed that the meaning of the mystics is compatible with
truth, whatever that may be ; and is itself therefore independ-
ent of any passing theory of it. We cannot then predeter-
mine the meaning and fate of mysticism by identifying it with
a doomed metaphysics. We shall judge mysticism first by
the mystics, not by the theories of a few: and the agreement
of the mystics lies in that fact, prior to doctrine, and wholly
coextensive with religion, the practice of union with God in
a special act of worship.

While we cannot attach the meaning of historic mysticism
to any one result of thought, it remains true that the art of
the mystic is closely allied with the art of thinking. We can-
not fairly explain worship as a developed and extended process
of reflection ; but we may yet find that thinking is definable
as a partial worship. Worship has its own way of reaching
wisdom, and must certainly make for truth rather than for
error. But if this is the case, how can we account for the
undoubted tendency of various important schools of mysticism
to converge upon that falsely abstract metaphysics ?

This seems to me to be the explanation : that the mystic in
reporting what he has experienced has attributed to the objects
of his experience some qualities which belong rather to his
own inner state. To distinguish between what is subjective
and what is objective about our experience is frequently
difficult, even in physical observation ; but especially in the

Off THE MEANING OF MYSTICISM 353

experience of the mystic, the objects are difficult to grasp,
while the inner event is comparatively tangible. It would be
strange if there were not a general tendency to mistake one
for the other. Let me enlarge a little upon this point.

The mystic prays ; and wins, if he is right, some answer to
his prayer which is significant to him. He has won knowl-
edge, and such knowledge as he thinks reflection could hardly
have brought him; but he cannot say exactly what it is.
Nothing is more notorious about the mystic's knowledge than
its inarticulateness. The mystic himself knows that his insight
is unfinished and unsatisfactory, even while he declares his
experience to be one of perfect satisfaction. " The soul knows
not what that God is she feels," says Corderius. Curiously
helpless and plastic is this knowledge: able to live under
various theological systems just because it needs some help
from the environment to determine what it is.1 It is not
without an independent force of reaction upon the conceptions
it uses ; but without these conceptions to give it voice, it could
scarcely win strength to react on them. And as the mystic
has been hard put to it to tell what it is that he knows, he has
in our later and Western world had increasing recourse to
reporting the psychology of his experience, in lieu of its cog-
nitive contents. Indeed, he has not only used psychology, but
has made it for his own purposes.

And unquestionably the reputation of mysticism in this
world would have suffered less if our mystics could earlier and
more completely have commanded this psychological mode of
expression. Objective-mindedness is the great merit of all
original religion ; but the long-standing inability to distinguish
between the characters of an experience as a temporal inner
state and the characters of its object has cost religion much.
Is it not more than probable that those words " one, immediate,
ineffable " which describe the Reality of the ** negative meta-
physics," are in their first intention descriptions of the mystic's
inner experience? May it not be that those negations which
1 See Holding. Philosophy of Religion, p. 178 if.

354: WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

have passed for metaphysical definitions are in their original
meaning rather confessions of mental obstruction and difficulty
than assertions about the Absolute ? There is a wide differ-
ence between saying, " My experience of Reality is ineffable "
(passing my present powers of expression) and saying
" Eeality is ineffable " (without predicates). As a report of
procedure and experience Reality may be that which one
realizes when he cuts himself off from "appearances," closes
as far as may be the avenues of sense, silences the cataract of
ideas, and withdraws his mind into its deepest cave : in such
manner it may be that the central unity of the soul meets
the central unity of the world, and knows it to be one with
itself* And yet, this report of experience is not to be forth-
with translated as a complete account of Reality. I must
abstract myself also to think ; but what I think is not therefore
an abstraction.

Something of the character of that experience must indeed
belong to its object. If there were no contrast in reality
between the one and the many, between the substance and its
appearances, between its indescribable and its describable
aspects, then an experience which was " one, immediate, and
ineffable " would find simply nothing in the world to light
upon. But he who would deny that such an experience can
discover anything real must be prepared to abolish the reality
of substance. The mystic cannot find the whole of reality,
but he may find its center ; he may find the only handle by
which the whole can be held as a unity.

And this is the advantage of psychology in dealing with
mysticism, that it is non-committal in regard to the cognitive
or other possible importance of an experience, and may yet
furnish the clue to such meaning. For where self-expression
falters the signs of meaning may still be read in causes and
effects. The immediacy of any experience must submit to
interpretation by what is outside it and related to it. The
logic and the psychology of our experiences are BO adjusted
that what becomes invisible to one becomes visible to the othe»

ON THE MEANING OF MYSTICISM 355

It is possible that the thread of meaning, lost though it may
be to the mystic himself in his ecstatic moment, may at that
very moment appear, so to speak, on the reverse of the cloth,
as something then and there happening to the substance of
the mystic himself ; justifying his sense of the "ontologieal
importance " of that event.

This implies, of course, that the "immediacy" of the
mystic experience has its external relations ; and this impli-
cation I fully accept and shall try to justify. Some part of
the meaning of this experience is to be discovered in its
external career. For which reason, not only the psycholo-
gist, but such other scientists as like him see mysticism in its
outer bearings, the historian, the sociologist, have been quicker
than the metaphysician to recognize its vital importance in
religion.

Mysticism, then, we shall define not by its doctrine but
by its deed, the deed of worship in its fully developed form.
Nothing concerns us more than to know what that experience
means, and what it may add to our knowledge of God : but
we shall not foreclose these questions by taking a finished
speculative system into our definition of mysticism. Mysticism
is a way of dealing with God, having cognitive and other fruit,
affecting first the mystic's being and then his thinking, afford-
ing him thereby answers to prayer which he can distinguish
from the results of his own reflection. Since the Pseudo-
Dionysius, " mystical theology " has not meant a rival
theology, but rather an " experimental wisdom," having its
own methods and its own audacious intention of meeting
deity face to face.

CHAPTER XXV

PRELIMINARY DOUBTS OF THE WORTH OP
WORSHIP

BUT can we find anything in ourselves to corroborate
that sense of " ontological importance " which
formerly attended the processes of worship ? To attain
union with God in a mystical experience, other than in
thoughtful attention to the mysteries of self-conscious-
ness and existence : we can no longer take it for granted
that there is any superior worth in this, or indeed any
worth at all. To our present ethical and immanental
mind, it is necessary to show cause why any distinctive
practices for religion should exist. To find God in
personal intercourse and business is enough, is it not ?
— the religion of daily life and duty is the important
thing. Let us approach God through these many
mediators — convenient mediators, requiring no devia-
tion from our reasonable plans. Further, is there not
something displeasing not alone about the historic
forms of mysticism but even about the notion of direct
unmediated union with deity ? If we avoid the vocative
case oftentime in dealing with our own great; how
much more in thinking of God- The pretence of the
mystic stands on no secure footing in this modest and
third-personal generation.

Only, let us be thoroughgoing. Let us be clear that
mysticism and common worshiD do stand or fall together.

THE WORTH OF WORSHIP 357

Are we prepared to make away with all religious observ-
ance, with " church," and all that goes with church ?
If not, then recognize here some muffled remonstrance
against the total vanishing of the art of the mystics.
Is any religious practice or institution, prayer or prayer-
posturing, solemnity, sacrament, or consecration, or
priestly-office in any form, of lingering significance to
us, even instinctive and irrational ? Then, in heaven's
name, let us do what we can to isolate this element,
valued by many in dumbness and dilution, and mate
an issue of its intrinsic worth.

Further, let us be clear that wherever mediated and
indirect relations are possible and valuable, there pre-
sumably immediate relations are possible and valuable
as well. Greenbacks and reflected light are on the
whole more widely useful than gold and direct sunshine ;
men have tried to get on without the originals here
also, but not so far successfully. And when we con-
sider, is not our doubt of worship even now directed
rather against the special mediators which worship has
been using than against the thing itself ? We do not
quite know what to do with our Holy Writ, our Christ,
our Priests and Saints, and our church institution. We
are trying to shift our mediators from these special ones
to some of more universal character. But just because
of this uncertainty of mediation, the element of unme-
diated dealing with God which is at the heart of all
mediated dealing must assume greater importance.
Could we regain the secret of the worth of worship, it
might well become clear to us what place in God's world
and humanity's world is to be taken by bibles, priests,
and redeemers. A true understanding of mysticism, I

368 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

venture to say, must either cleanly emancipate us from
the whole of special religious trapping and performance,
or else reanimate in some vital fashion our historic
system of mediation.

Thus, though the art of worship as interpreted by the
mystic is foreign to many of our prejudices, a definite
self-understanding may still show that a clear rejection
is too indiscriminate : it may be one of those things
which we can hardly live with, nor yet live without.
The effort to dispense with it is the best way to realize
its vitality.1 And it may be possible, as a preliminary
to our detailed study of mysticism, to verify — even in
a superficial review of our own current consciousness —
certain of those motives which have led men in the past
to approach their god thus directly and individually.
I doubt much whether that ancient sense of " onto-
logical importance " is yet dead. The instinctive nature
of prayer is some guarantee of its survival ; and it is
fair to assume that every fundamental instinct can
present intelligible grounds for its existence. The
expressions of prayer are sensitive to all the advances
of self-consciousness; hence there is little outward
resemblance between our own reserved devotions and
those enthusiastic orgies, incantations, and slaughter-
feasts — we can put ourselves to worship more handily
than did our forefathers and with less noise. But in

1 Worship is an art which is perhaps being lost rather from over-
practice and dilution of its proper instinct than from actual loss of the
secret. We think that we know what it is all about; we find that we get
on perfectly well without it; we learn with some surprise that we can
give no tenable reason for pursuing it; we end by judging that it is not
for us, who are now able to follow our religion by the pervasive and unob-
trusive processes of thought and moral action.

THE WORTH OF WORSHIP 359

some way, if I mistake not, we can still recognize in
ourselves traces of that impulse which in the religious
tongue is called the " love of God/' some form of that
same ancient demand for more direct touch with our
Absolute than the usual processes of thought afford.

In the first place, no one wholly escapes the sway of
a certain spiritual ambition, which is unwilling — if
there be in the universe any supreme consciousness —
to remain apart, or in any relation to that consciousness
which is relatively external and distant. If there is in
the world any such being as God is supposed to be, a
career is set for every soul : there is an inevitable trend
of all finite spirits to a consciously understood footing
with that being. In structure this is a well-known
principle of human action. It is akin to the necessity
whereby every Christopher must serve his Strongest :
because, namely, it is not good, and in the long run
insupportable, that two great, self-conscious, self-appre-
ciating powers should exist in simple pluralism or
disunion, unperceptive of each other, unmeasured
against each other. The strong man who values his
strength is restless until he finds that situation in the
world where his strength is placed. There is a neces-
sity imposed upon every self-knowing thing to seek the
most self-knowing and the most excellent as that in
whose presence it finds itself finally known and judged.1

1 Doubtless I am attributing to the lovers of God a greater sense of
their own merits than at once appears to their own overt consciousness.
But in all these matters we are seeking an interpretation that is not yet
found : and we must assume the privilege of knowing the soul of the
mystic, if not better than it knows itself, at least more analytically, appeal-
ing to our own self-scrutiny above all traditional descriptions of the
worshipful temper.

360 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

There is an impulse here like that by which men flock
to cities and to great occasions, seeking centers where
there is adequate knowledge, measurement, and placing
of men. A fundamental and holy presumption of worth
there is in this love of God, such as no soul can dissem-
ble. However retiring the spirit may be with regard to
the highly-conscious regions of this historic world, to be
retiring with regard to God is unmeaning and impossible.
A sheer hunger there is in all of us for self-conscious-
ness more nearly absolute than we yet have : in some
form and degree this motive is felt and appreciated by
all men.

And what we can thus appreciate in diffusion, we
must allow to come to legitimate dominance in special-
ization (quite another thing from extravagance or ex-
aggeration). In some souls this ambition may still
become a ruling passion, and in them we may best
see the meaning of what is vague and truncated in
ourselves. To such minds the simple fact of the
existence of a god is an imperative profound and practi-
cal: prayer with them becomes a clarified and persistent
purpose which strikes out at once upon an unrecalled
journey of devotion. This impulse is seen at its height
in those precocious mystics who even in childhood (as
Teresa and Gruyon) could not hear of martyrdom without
a surge of envy, and resolves to become martyrs likewise.
Here is a spiritual exquisiteness which may easily become
a spiritual avarice : but it is obviously in this sense a
disinterested love, that it takes precedence of all other
interests, and requires no recompense in their terms.
These are the mystics by birth, — they who "desire to
leave all in order to be with God."

THE WORTH OF WORSHIP 361

But note well that while the mystic of genius is a
natural product, the mystic impulse is not a matter of
special temperament. For there are mystics in all tem-
peraments. This incentive is deep enough in human
nature to take various forms according to the disposition
of the mind. There are fierce mystics as well as tender
ones ; men who scorn to live in a world where they are
uncertain of their own souls ; who storm the gates of
the heavenly city till they wrest from God the pledge
of their security — the Jacobs, Brunos, Luthers. Tinder
all such saintly bluster and Teuf elsdrockian defiance we
can still recognize the love of God, the ontological
ambition, the need of an unyielding origin for the
thrusts of the will. There are practical and world-mov-
ing mystics as well as dreamy ones, — the Mohammeds,
Bernards, Loyolas, Wesleys.1 The love of God, also,
will be coloured by every defect of the lover : there will
be sentimental mystics, and cowardly mystics, and lazy
mystics, and many another sort. It is the property of
mysticism to set all such elements of personality into
high relief — not a disadvantage, if one demands self-
knowledge. We have no present interest in these
peculiarities save to show that the spiritual ambition of
the mystic is the prerogative of no one peculiar type of
human nature.

The love of God, I have said, desires the assured
presence of God and tihie drastic self-knowledge which
that presence brings, as an immediate insight. But

1 Wesley and Luther were mystics within our definition, though both
were hostile to certain types of mysticism which came uncomfortably near
to their own positions, so that verbally they are known rather as opponents
of mysticism than as mystics.

362 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

there is another aspect of this same spiritual ambition ;
for worship seems to contain a demand for knowledge
of truth about the world, as well as about self. The
mystic reports that he now knows something about the
meaning of life and death, and of the other grave
things that concern mankind. This is such knowl-
edge as each individual soul of man has need of, and
such as one can hardly accept either on hearsay or on
inference, if it can be obtained in one's own immediate
perception.

Fear of the unknown, the primitive human fear, though
it has become much socialized, is not to be banished.
Our own personal destiny we may now, in the midst of
a worthful social order, more readily and honorably
forget than could our ancestors: and to affect an
unconcern regarding death and the future has become
in some eyes a stock virtue. But these things cannot
always be forgotten, nor ever rightfully forgotten, until
we have once cleared our minds with regard to them.
The need to make immediately sure the foundations of
life is not an impulse that can grow antiquated or
improper. No motive to prayer is more fundamental
than this, which in presence of such a limit of insight
as makes the soul a subordinate in the universe requires
of existence the power to surmount it. And on no
point are the mystics more agreed than on this, that
worship brings " revelation." The " noetic " character
of mystic experience is so general that James includes it
in his definition of mysticism. How, in the presence of
God who knows these things, the worshipper also gains
some insight into them I do not here enquire ; but it
seems evident that the impulse of prayer has in it as one

THE WORTH OF WORSHIP 363

ingredient a desire for such insight as this ; and that
some of the mystics think themselves to have gained it.
The mystic's remarkable inability to speak out may
be no discredit to either the value or the universality
of what he so mysteriously knows. It is a principle
observable elsewhere that the more heavily we are
impressed by a truth, the more difficult it is to put its
significance at once into words. He who knows in any
intense and profound fashion may labor, as poets have
sometimes done, for years with the burden of his mean-
ing. It is quite possible to win an insight suddenly,
and to know that one has it; and yet to find that
knowledge standing forth in the midst of the soul like
a body at once powerfully charged and powerfully
insulated, sputtering with sparks and fringes and
penumbrse, but accomplishing no relieving strokes.
The circumstance which gives credit to the mystic's
assertion is that he has held himself responsible for his
alleged revelation. He has labored to make it public,
notwithstanding its difficulty. Boehme spends twelve
years, so he tells us, in bringing to birth the truth with
which two such experiences had burdened him. In
spite of what James tells us, that the mystic's knowledge
is not binding on any but himself, it is obvious that the
mystic is under some radical necessity of propagating
his truth : is he not the most vehement propagandist of
history ? And have not men, on the whole, benefitted
by his announcements ? Some knowledge of universal
truth, it seems, may come to men through worship.

And our judgment of tibte worth of worship must
also take into account, as I surmise, the worth of novelty

364 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

in knowledge and in life generally. In the worship of
the gods, the force of all habits is for the moment
destroyed, hahits of mind and of action. In tribal life,
the customary taboos are suspended; the moment of
worship is an antinomian moment, and what is deposited
out of it may be different from what was dissolved into
it. Prom their mystics the people are ready at this
time to hear things and to receive commands which
would previously have been blasphemy. Mystical prac-
tices may themselves become habitual, and have their
acknowledged place in the system of things ; oracles
and prophecies have their established modes and places :
but these are habitual ways of receiving the destruction
of habit ; they are the point of fixity which renders all
other fixities relative and unnecessary. Worship is the
provision which the spiritual constitution has made for
its own perpetual amendment.

In the increasing solidification of tribal life, and the
submergence of personality in the " cake of custom,"
the god-consulting process is the one spot which remains
fluent and stra/nge to the tribe itself. Hence doubtless
the uncouth forms in which mystical practices have
clothed themselves; the strange spot in the life of a
strange people may well seem alien to our own habits
(unless, indeed, we find it the one spot in which that
weird social machinery becomes wholly human and uni-
versal). But however tamed worship may become, it
has always this same function in the life of people or
of individual : it involves the external criticism of all
habit, and a radical openness to novelty. Within the
motive of worship there is to be discerned, I believe, a
weariness of the old, the habitual, the established, — a

THE WORTH OF WORSHIP 365

hunger for what is radically new and untried. This is,
in part, the significance of that deliberate undoing of all
bonds and attachments, of all received knowledges and
properties, which is part of the preparation for the mys-
tical experience in all ages. If it were possible for the
soul to become aware of all its attachments and habits,
how could it be better disposed for originality? The
scientific discipline of the mind is of the same effect
in its own sphere: to disaffect oneself as far as may
be of prepossessions, to recognize and allow for the
biases of the person, the body, and the age. It is not
improbable, then, that worship may include this value
of preparing the soul for the reception of novelty
with its primary value of uniting the worshipper with
his God.

Worship may be regarded as an attempt to detach
oneself from everything else in uniting with God. It
seeks God first as an object, that Other of all worldly
objects; and it seeks to join itself to that absolute
Other. The mystic proceeds by negation; this and
that, he says, are not God : it is not these that I seek.
The effort of worship measures the soul's power of
detachment. And my power of detachment measures
the whole of my freedom, the whole of my possibility
of happiness, the whole of my possible originality, the
whole depth and reach of my morality and of my human
contribution. What the mystic reaches is, in terms of
his world-conceptions, a zero : not indeed the Whole of
reality, but Substance, the heart of God. It is just
such a zero as one encounters when he seeks his own
soul behind the shifting content of his experience, or
when he seeks the soul of another, in distinction from

366 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

that other's various external expressions. This zero is
not a place to stay in; but it may be pre-eminently a
place to return to, and to depart from. In worship
one touches the bottom of that bottomless pit of Self
and perceives at hand the real Origin of things ; gaining
not the whole of any knowledge, but the beginning
and measure of all knowledge. May not worship be
described as the will to become, for a moment and
within one's own measure, what existence is ; or more
simply, as the act of recalling oneself to 'being?

If these suggestions have truth in them, the act of
worship may begin to justify itself, even from the stand-
point of use in experience. It might be described as
a spontaneous impulse for spiritual self-preservation;
for self-placing, for the ultimate judgment of life, and
for the perpetual renewal of the worth of life. And in
thus returning to the sources of being we may still more
dimly discern, it may be, a self-preservation of farther
scope, such as immortality may hang on ; a glint of
ontological bearing of unlimited importance.

It is true that the "love of God" does not explicitly
seek these things : it is the wholly simple impulse of
which these strands are but artificially severed elements.
The worth of God's presence to the genuine mystic is
a sufficient and absolute good ; and he often expresses
himself as if the ecstasy of his moment were its own
justification. But every immediate value must be sanc-
tioned by its bearings in the system of all values, must
have a meaning which can give account of itself in
the form of knowledges such as we have suggested.
Worship must not be an intoxication which alienates

THE WORTH OF WOKSHIP 367

the soul from the duller interests of experience ; and
hence, as mysticism has learned its own meaning, it
has realized that subjective delight recommends noth-
ing, and that the supremacy of the moment of its
experience must be judged by the staying powers of
its insight.

We must not hesitate, therefore, to explain the love
of God by what it is not, — the one by the many, the
disinterested by the interested, the self-abandoning by
the self-seeking. We must assert that there is no love
of God which is not at the same time an unlimited self-
valuation ; that there is always something self-seeking
about worship and mysticism generally. Something
forever dissatisfied with what mankind, in its habit,
philosophy, art, and formulae generally have to offer
this individual soul for its safety and comfort and occu-
pation and enjoyment and loyalty. Not good enough
is all this for my personal particular spirit, says the
mystic ; nothing in the world is good enough for me.
But because of this personal dissatisfaction, and demand,
and further seeking for self, something creative might
well come of worship, we think. And something not
un-social in its result. Perhaps this spark of ontological
ambition which creative nature has deposited in the
single self, is nature's own way of bringing the new to
pass for the good of all creation. It is indeed the
noblest and truest of all self-seeking tempers, the utmost
measure of character and' worth. The love wherewith
God loves the individual may reappear, perchance, in
that love wherewith the individual loves God, — and
himself, — and all men.

So much, then, for preliminary conjectures as to the

368 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

possible permanent worth of worship, the meaning of
the mystical love of God. We may now put ourselves,
I trust with greater patience, to an examination of the
facts in the case.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE MYSTIC'S PREPARATION: THE NEGATIVE
PATH

"YTTHAT worship is, and how it differs from think-
V V ing, the mystics themselves have made copious
efforts to explain. Whatever the distinctive nature of
worship may be, something of it should appear in a
study of the ways used by the mystics in approaching
their god, and in the directions which they have given
to other souls who would win the same certainty.

In undertaking such a study, we shall not do well to
impose at first our own language upon the mystics. We
must give ourselves over for the time to their guidance,
to their own modes of expression, and even — so far as
we can — to their sentiments; realizing that they are
laboring with conceptions not wholly literalized, and
that we shall be able in due course to win our own
freedom and our own interpretation.

But as the mystics have been pioneers in psycholog-
ical analysis we shall not be at any moment free from
the necessity of looking behind their language. In
trying to give explicit guidance, our spiritual directors
have been only too careful, too profuse, too minute in
their distinctions ; and one must perforce ride over the
distinctions somewhat roughly. And further, we must
expect much of the figurative and even cryptic in their
speech. There seems to be some intrinsic difficulty

370 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

about explaining worship in literal terms, or without
presupposing that the hearer already knows what is
meant. The Book itself nowhere explains, but simply
assumes that we understand what is implied in " lifting
up our eyes unto the hills/' and in all similar figures.1

Indeed, there is a strong disposition in the mystic,
even when he acts as guide, to give up the effort of
describing what is distinctive of worship : he is inclined
to summarize whatever is unique about the process, and
especially whatever distinguishes it from thinking, by
invoking a special faculty of the mind — this we have
already noticed. Nothing could more strongly express
his conviction that worship and thought are diverse;
but of course all such appeals to a special faculty throw
the burden of understanding back upon the hearer.
The names which the mystics have invented for this
special faculty are curious and wonderful, yet not with-
out power of suggestion. We found Tauler, in the

1 As power of psychological analysis grows, our mystic advisers are
able to meet the soul more nearly on its own ground ; yet the results of
this progress for the most part make not less demand, but rather more,
upon our native understanding. This passage from Tauler is not more
cryptic than many another : " Only to those is this great Good, Light, and
Comfort revealed who are outwardly pure and inwardly enlightened, and
who know how to dwell withia themselves. . . . When the Nameless in
the soul turns itself wholly inward toward God, there follows and turns
with it everything which in man hath a name. And this turning attaches
itself always to that in God which is likewise Nameless. . . . Then in
such a man God announces his true peace." Such words as these are
surely addressed rather to those who already know than to those who from
the standpoint of ignorance enquire, and Tauler is not unconscious of this.
" Now I will tell you something further of this search . . . and in plain
German words, too ; yet I fear that you will not all understand them.
But those of you who have already experienced something of such sacred
things, and in whom such light has once inwardly sm'ned, may well
understand something of what I say/1 (Predigten, ii. 307, Ausg. 1841.)

THE NEGATIVE PATH 371

passage quoted, referring to this faculty as " the Name-
less in the soul " ; and Tauler is exceptionally fertile in
just such names for this Nameless. It is called the
Spark of the soul (Fiinklein, Eckhart; Scintilla, Bona-
ventura), the Apex of the soul, also the Ground of the
soul, further, its Groundless Nothing, its Right Eye, its
Eternal Eye, its Upward Face, its Innermost, and the
like. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. We
understand these expressions, more or less dimly, just
as we understand what " The Subconscious " is — our
modern Great Fetich of a special faculty : we under-
stand them in so far as we find within our own experi-
ence something which may serve as key to the riddle.
We have, indeed, no reason to reject as meaningless
these appeals to a special faculty : we are no longer in
danger of picturing our mind in insulated compart-
ments: we may use these names as indicating the
process of worship in its totality, and vaguely charac-
terizing its difference from other activities.1 They are
summary names for our problem, and as such they are
useful and true : but they are the beginning of our
analysis, not the end of it.

Various as the ways are which mystics in different
ages have used in approaching their god, their resem-

1 We know that one "faculty" is distinguished from another only
(a) by difference in the objects with which it deals, and (b) by a differ-
ence in the procedure by which these objects are found. The faculty of
religious knowledge is thus to be defined (a) by the fact that it considers
God as its object, and (b) by the fact that we have distinctive things to
do in order to approach God. The faculty itself is but a name for these
actions taken as one.

372 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

blances run deep. In all of them there are efforts of
the mind fairly described in the mediaeval terms, purga-
tion and meditation. And in all of them these active
efforts are brought to a close by a voluntary passivity.

Let me note in passing that in all acts of will, the
body plays its part; and it is the physical side of all
mental acts, whether one sets himself about thinking,
or enjoying, or praying, which is most directly control-
lable. In proportion as the inner process is subtle and
evanescent, the physical preliminaries must be extensive.
The most delicate instruments of precision require the
heaviest of foundations. If attention is preparing for
some especiallyfinediscrimination,as in listening for faint
sounds, the larger muscles will be called into play as a
frame to the smaller ones. Thus in worship also, or
rather, especially in worship, the physical basis must be
cared for : the first preparation of the mystic has always
been a physical preparation, more or less elaborate — of
cleansing, fasting, continence, ascetic practices generally,
solitude, darkness, kneeling or other special disposition
of the body. We have no need to go into the details
of these performances, which are at bottom quite as
instinctive as are the physical efforts of thought and
emotion ; we have simply to note their necessary presence.
Worship is too spiritual a process to dispense with the
material. It is only by the enlistment of the body, in
some fashion, that the body can be held in leash during
the difficult flight of the soul.

Now of the inner preparation itself which accompan-
ies this external activity, it is predominantly negative ;
and we may begin by considering the mystic's self-denial,
or "purgation."

THE NEGATIVE PATH 373

The mystic's effort is largely given to suppressing the
various natural momenta both o£ the mind and of the
desires, — an essay, as we have said, in detachment. It
is a summary exercise of one's power both of abstraction
and of renunciation. " Into this house (of his innermost
self) must man now go, and completely desist from and
abandon his sensations, and all sensible things, such as
are brought into the soul and perceived by the senses
and the imagination. And he must also put away all
ideas and forms, even the conceptions of reason, and all
activity of his own reason." l " A man must begin by
denying himself, and willingly forsaking all things for
God's sake, and must give up his own will, and all his
natural inclinations, and separate and cleanse himself
thoroughly from all sins and evil ways . . . And when
a man hath thus broken loose from and outleaped all
temporal things and creatures, he may afterward become
perfect, " etc. "No one can be enlightened unless he be
first cleansed or purified and stripped. So also, no one
can be united with God unless he be first enlightened.
Thus there are three stages: first, the purification (or
purgation); secondly, the enlightening; thirdly, the
union." 2

In this sort of mental and moral self-suppression,
there is much room for casuistry. The attempt to
deny self completely brings Oriental mystic and West-
ern mystic into the same familiar paradoxes of self-
consciousness. From what self, and from what desires
must I detach myself? or from all? And if from all,
for what motive?

1 Tauler. 3. Predigt auf den 3. Sonnt. nach Trin.

* Theologia Germanica, trans. Winkworth, chs. xui and riv.

374 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

Here the philosophies part the mystics. The more
roundly God is divided off from the world, the more
unrelenting is the antithesis between all heavenly and
all earthly affections. If we can draw a clear line
between the eternal and the temporal the task of repu-
diating the temporal becomes a deadly affair. If it is
once fairly accomplished, the mystic has destroyed all
reason for return. "If our inward man were to make
a leap and spring into the Perfect, we should find and
taste how that the Perfect is without measure . . . better
and nobler than all which is imperfect and in part, and
the Eternal above the temporal or perishable, and the
fountain and source above all that floweth or can ever
flow from it. Thus that which is imperfect and in part
would become tasteless and be as nothing to us." l Such
a soul has become a citizen of another country; it
resumes its loves, if at all, with a gleam of absence —
the mystic has become spoiled for living.2

It is one of the most extraordinary facts about human
nature that it is capable, under the spell of religious
ambition, of such superhuman heart-steeling. A large
part of the fame of mysticism in history is due to its
achievements in indifference. And though the giants
of self-mutilation may have been the victims of mis-
taken theories, I find in their willingness to pay the
extreme price something heroic to which I cannot but
do reverence. He who believes that " if God is to come
in, the creatures must go out " must make his drastic
choice.

1 Theologia Germanica, ch. vi.

2 "And if our Lord did not now and then suffer these visions to be
forgotten, though they recur again and again to memory, I know not how
life could be home." Teresa, Life, ch. aomii (tr. Lewis).

THE NEGATIVE PATH 375

But human nature has also its own quiet refutations :
these holy ones do often grow less zealous when sep-
arated from their influence and fame. Can it be that
all this violence has but driven worldly interest to more
subtle attachments? For the most part, yes: the love
of life has been dispersed and transformed, not destroyed.
It has been, in part, the good-fortune of mysticism that
self-scrutiny has its limits ; that many a wider human
affection may exist without being observed and hunted
to death. If St. Catherine of Siena has become the
"bride of Christ" she cannot, of course, be the bride of
any mortal : but she is set free to love many a mortal as
no other woman dare. Fortunate St. Catherine, whose
self-searching has its limit. Unfortunate Meister Eck-
hart and many another who can think out such demands
as this : " So long as ye desire to fulfil the will of God
and have any desire, even after eternity and God, so
long are ye not truly poor. He alone hath true spiritual
poverty who wills nothing, knows nothing, desires noth*
ing."1 Here mysticism groans on the rack of its own
logic; and must continue to do so, until after untold
spiritual agony it discovers the meaning of its negations.
This radical self-annihilation must give way : the negation
of opposition must become a negation of priority. For
the sounder mystics the love of God remains at the heart
of their plural other loves: and if the fires of these

1 InjuaticetoEckhartl should say that he is not always so nihilistic.
The following fragment of a saying (italics mine) may more fairly
express what he means: "was ist luterkeit? das ist das sich der mensche
gekeret habe von alien creaturen vnt sin herce so gar uf gerichtet babe
gen dem lutern guot, das ime kein creature trcestlichen si, vnt xr ouch
nit begere denne als uil als si das luter guot, das got ist, darinne begrffin
mag" Wackeroagel, Altd. Leseb., col. 681.

376 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

become invisible during the moment of sacred passion,
it is not the invisibility of death. They have joined
their tongues in one upleaping flame, to return without
break to the severalty of their individual altars.

Changing conceptions admit some union of the infi-
nite with the finite; nevertheless the active part of
worship still remains a path of negation. For the god
whom the mystic seeks is in fact something other than
any given natural object of pursuit; and since we are
always better aware of what our absolute is not than of
what it is, the note of negation must remain predomi-
nant. But meanwhile, worship has its positive side
also; the mystic has always in some way recognized the
fact that passion can be cast out only by some greater
passion. We may now consider what these positive
elements are.

| II

In turning away from the world, the mystic has
always needed something to turn toward ; in all of his
purgation there has been an element of " meditation."
He has done what he can to find his own positive ulti-
mate will, to make real to himself what it is that he
most deeply cares for. He has tried to remind himself
of his absolute good.

A great part of what we commonly know as prayer
is, in effect, just such a process of self-reminding. The
simplest rational account of prayer would probably be
this: a voluntary recollection of those deepest prin-
ciples of will, or preference, which the activities of liv-
ing tend to obscure. In essence, this is not different
from the practice developed chiefly by the Roman

THE NEGATIVE PATH 377

Stoics, who found it useful as a matter of self-discipline
to recall, in this or that trying situation, what is truly
to be desired and valued, and what is a mere illusion of
value. " Straightway practise saying to every harsh
appearance, you are an appearance, and in no wise
what you pretend to be. ... Never say about any-
thing, I have lost it ; but say, I have restored it. ... Is
the oil spilled ? Say, on the occasion, At such a price
is sold freedom from perturbation. ... In every cir-
cumstance, hold these reflections ready :

Lead me, O Zeus, and them, 0 Destiny,

The way I am bid by you to go :

To follow I am ready. If I choose not,

I make myself a wretch — and still must follow."

Thus the practice of bethinking oneself of one's first
principles of value shades with Epictetus insensibly into
prayer.

But in the prayers of the typical mystics, the act of
self-reminding is less frequently concerned with such
explicit truths or principles: it is more often a medi-
tation upon some object in which values are rather
embodied than expressed. Objects of familiar pious
reflection are chosen as means of recovering the mystic
strand of consciousness, and of bringing into abstract
preference the quality of conviction. A concrete
object, moreover, is less confining than a formula : it
has its truth as the formula has, but in infinite con-
centration. Especially if this object is a person, or an
event of religious history, the soul may find in it an all
but adequate embodiment of the absolute good, bear-
ing at once on all circumstances of life, and not on
some only.

378 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

But neither the formula nor the concrete object is
wholly satisfactory as an object of meditation.1 As the
mystic becomes proficient, he recognizes that all such
objects have but relative worth.2 Teresa used at one time
to begin her orisons with thoughts of episodes of the
Passion : but she writes, " There are many souls who
make greater progress by meditation on other subjects j
for as there are many mansions in heaven, so there are
many roads leading thither. Some persons advance by
considering themselves in hell — others in heaven ; and
these latter are distressed by meditations on hell."
Clearly, then, there is no necessity in any of these
objects. And further, their office (as objects of delib-
erate meditation) is transient: they must go, at last,
the way of all other objects of thought and desire.

For to all the mystics, whether of East or West, this

1 In the choice of these objects, the working of experience is evi-
dent : any religious tradition lights upon the words and episodes and
characters and phrases and hymns which best mediate the mystic con-
sciousness of its own epoch ; and as the mental attitude to be reached is
one of difficulty, this choice must be sensitive to all the shades of human
temper. It is here that questions of taste intrude to dispel religious har-
mony : acceptable objects for such reflection must vary not alone from
age to age, but also from person to person, and from social group to social
group. A loss of sympathy here makes the greatest of difficulties in reli-
gious understanding, quite apart from questions of creed* We do not now
find those objects edifying upon which our mediaeval brethren could dwell
for pious hours without pall, and which made the themes of their religious
art. What we have to do is to penetrate to what is necessary and uni-
versal in these objects, fitting to humanity, and not to this or that stage
of religious sentiment.

2 I ignore for the present questions which naturally gave the Chris-
tian mystics much trouble, whether in the higher reaches of prayer any
consciousness remains of the sacred humanity, the Holy Trinity, etc. See,
for instance, Fdnelon, Explication des Marimes des Saints, Arts, xxvii,
xxviii.

THE NEGATIVE PATH 379

stage of meditation is a mere preliminary; and the
function of these objects is at least as thoroughly
negative as positive. They have rather to recall the
mind from other things than to fix it upon themselves.
Their function is chiefly one of neutralizing and sky-
clearing : in so far as they leave the mind occupied with
particular images, they too must be put away. The
Yogi must meditate upon the syllable OM, but only
to unify his mind and to prepare for the exclusion of
that syllable together with all other objects : it is but
a ladder which in mounting he puts beneath him ; it is
the sand with which the sweeper covers his floor.

The one positive admonition which is most persistent
is the vague direction to turn the thoughts inward.
And even the meaning of this "inward" is rather
not-outward than positively introspective.1 " Introrsum
ascendere " is the brief formula for the mystic's self-
direction. In all its vagueness this direction has prob-
ably served a better purpose than any attempt to be
more explicit. For any positive and literal direction is
apt to become a misdirection, a danger clearly recognized
by many a keen student of human nature among the
mystics, and warned against. " Let him not presume
to approach that excellent Darkness which is beyond
all Light, but rather the darkness of the not-knowing of
God; and there let him yield himself to God in all
simplicity, asking nothing, begging and desiring nothing,
but loving and intending only God, and verily such an

1 In so far as it suggests a subjectivity of interest, we shall find the
mystic endeavoring to correct the impression. " To ascend to God," says
Hugo of Saint Victor, " is to enter into ourselves ; and not only so, but
in our inmost selves to transcend ourselves" (ineffabili quodam modo in
intimis se ipsum transire).

380 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

unknown God. Yea, upon His unknown will let him
throw all his affairs and concerns as well as his sins and
wickedness as they there occur to him, and this all with
genuine love."1

Thus the content of the object of meditation tends
to reduce to a nothing — so far as picture-content is con-
cerned— but not quite to nothing, unless will is nothing.

Ill

In the long experimental history of these efforts of
purgation and meditation, three things have become
clear. First, that the mystic cannot complete his own

1 I cannot refrain from quoting here at length Tauler's recognition
of this difficulty.

" In dieser seiner Erneuerung und Einkehrung erschwinget sich der
Geist alsbald ueber sich, gegen die gottliclie Finsterniss, viel geschwinder
und hoher, als ein Adler gegen die Sonne. . . . Hiervon stebet im Buche
Hiob also geschrieben : ' Dem Manne iat der Weg verborgen, und Gott
hat ihn umgeben mit Finsterniss/ namlich, mit Finsterniss der Unbegreif-
Hchkeit oder Unerkennlichkeit Gottes, da er weit iiber alles, dass ihm
zugeschrieben werden kann, erhaben, und ganz namen-, form-, und bildlos
ist, ja er ubertrifft darin alle Weise und alles Wesen. Und dies ist, liebe
Christen, die wesentliche Einkehrung, zu der das Stillscbweigen der
Nacht, samt ihrer Rube und Einsamkeit, sehr viel hilf t und niitzet. Darum
rathe ich einem jeden treulich, wenn er vor der Mette gut geschlaf en hat,
dass er sich alien seinen Sinnen und sinnlichen Kraften gleichsam entziehe,
und nach verrichteter Mette mit alien seinen Kraften sich iiber alle Bilder
und Formen versenke, ja, iiber alle seine Sinne und Kraf te sich erschwinge.
Doch solle er wegen seiner Eleinheit und Nichfcigkeit nicht gedenken
noch sich vornehmen sich der vortreffiichen Finsterniss zu nahen, von
welcher ein Lehrer spricht: 'dass Gott eine Finsterniss sei nach allem
Licht,' sondern zu der Finsterniss der Nichterkennung
Gottes, und da ergebe er sich Gott ganz einf altiglich, f rage nichts, bitte
und begebre auch nichts, sondern liebe und meine nur Gott, und zwar
einen solchen unbekannten Gott; ja, in seinen unbekannten Willen
werfe er alle seine Sachen und Geschafte, auch seine Gebrechen und
Siinden, so ihm alsdann einfallen, und dies alles mit wirklicher Liebe."
Predigtenii,553.

THE NEGATIVE PATH 381

purification ; second, that there is a clear self-contradic-
tion in trying to expel all desire ; third, that when the
deepest will attempts to subordinate all partial desires
by setting up its own absolute good as an object of
meditation, this effort is notably liable to substitute
some false god for the true one. Taken together, these
three results amount to a practical demonstration that
the attempt of worship, in so far as it depends upon the
mystic's own active efforts, is impossible.

There must be some way of cutting short these infi-
nite processes of self-preparation, if in order to see God
one must in fact accomplish a pure heart. The mystics
have not failed to find ways of summarizing all this
preparation in a single act. Ruysbroeck, for example,
cuts the knot by a stroke of will : we have the neces-
sary humility and love if we will to have them. In the
good-will to renounce oneself, the renunciation is, for
the purposes of worship, completed. Santa Teresa has
another way of concluding the matter : let us once
clearly see and acknowledge our defects, and in that
knowledge be free from them. " This matter of self-
knowledge," she says, " must never be put aside. . . .
The knowledge of our sins and of our own selves is the
bread which we have to eat with all our meats, however
pleasant they may be, in the way of prayer ; without
this bread life cannot be sustained, though it must be
taken with measure. . . . (But) when a soul beholds
itself resigned, and clearly understands that there is no
goodness in it ... why should it be necessary for it to
waste its time on this subject? From foolish devo-
tions, Lord deliver us/* For both Teresa and Ruys-
broeck this dismissal of the processes of prolonged self-

382 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

discipline is made possible by a self-examination which
has reduced all their sinful desire to one category,
namely, pride: and it is the summary repudiation of
this pride, in the one by a magnificent will to be hum-
ble, in the other by a clear perception of its nature, that
effectually closes the earlier stages of preparation.

But whether in one way or another these efforts are
brought to an end, the mystic finds himself at last not
trying, but waiting. His last effort is to destroy all
effort, and to make himself wholly passive. It seems,
indeed, as if the attainment of passivity, of the right
kind, were the whole aim of these preparations; the
act of worship having rather to clear the way for the
assertion of some other power, inner or outer, than to
do anything of its own. Just how this passivity is to
be brought about, and what it consists in, is not easy
for the mystic to define. He uses many a figure to
describe it: emptiness (Ledigkeit), silence, permissive-
ness (Lidekeit, Lidelicheit, lydende Vernunft, — Tauler),
poverty, destruction of self, inward stillness (innere
Gelassenheit, — Suso), nothingness (in the sense of the
" 0, to be nothing " hymn), even idleness, or dormancy
("Miissigkeit"), l death, extinction. In the ideal of
passivity, indeed, we come upon one of those far-
reaching discoveries of religious experience which take
a thousand shapes and names, and enter in various
degrees into all phases of worship. In Quietism, it
comes to an especial cultivation : for if one must resort

1 " Alles das Gott von uns haben will, das 1st, class wir miissig aeyen
and ilm Werkmeister seyn lassen ; waren wir ganz und gar miissig, so
waren wir vollkommne Menschen." Tauler, quoted by Earl Schmidt, in
« Johannes Tauler/' p 120.

THE NEGATIVE PATH 383

to passivity in the end, why not from the first. But in
Luther's appeal to grace, rather than to works, his reli-
ance on the forgiveness of sins; in the self-abandon-
ment of conversion ; and in many another assertion of
the "feeling of absolute dependence"; we see other
forms of this same principle of passivity which com-
pletes the preparation of the mystic.

However, it is obvious that there can be no question,
here, of pure passivity. The state is the precise opposite
of a state of drifting, or of psychical indolence. The
will to worship remains to distinguish this nothingness
from all others. The mind is in a condition of power-
fully directed attention. Such as the term "contem-
plation " suggests.1 The effect of all these various
self-suppressing efforts has been to lop off interfering
and distracting movements of attention ; whereby all
the strength of these inhibited tendencies has been told
over into a single comprehensive thrust of the mental
energies. It is a suppression of body by body ; of
desire by desire; of activity by activity; in sum, a
suppression of self by Self. The loss of self and of
self-consciousness of which the mystics often speak, a
loss concomitant with the cessation of traffic with things,
is essentially a recalling of all subordinate and partial
selfhoods into the one master-self of all, a simplification,
and at the same time an extreme heightening of self-con-
sciousness in its now exclusive relation to its Absolute.2

3 " Contemplation," as used by the mediaeval mystic, implies that the
effort of " meditation," in which one holds the object before the mind by
force of will, gives way to a state in which the object attracts and holds
attention without further conscious effort.

2 " This slumber of the mind resembles at first a negation of exist-
ence, but it is the exaltation thereof. Nothing perishes in us but the

384 WOESHIP AND THE MYSTICS

Something deeply paradoxical there is about this volun-
tary passivity of the mystic, like the motionlessness of
a rapid wheel or the ease and silence of light. And
this paradox the mystics themselves have not failed to
observe and study. They have seen that there is an
idle passivity which must by all means be ruled out ;
and they have spared no effort to distinguish between
the true passivity and the false. Let me quote a few
of their own explanations.

These from Molinos :

" By not speaking, not desiring, not thinking, one arrives
at the true and perfect mystical silence wherein God speaks
with the soul, communicating himself to it, and in the Abyss
of its own Depth teaches it the most perfect and exalted
Wisdom. . . . Strive to be resigned in all things with silence,
and in so doing, without saying that thou lovest Ifim, thou
wilt attain to the most perfect, quiet, effectual, and true love."

" The very Virtues which have been acquired and not
purified are a hindrance to this great gift of the Peace of the
Soul, and the more so, the more the soul is dogged by an
inordinate desire for sublime gifts, by the wish for spiritual
consolations, by sticking to infused graces, entertaining her*
self with them, and desiring more of them in order to enjoy
them : and finally, by a desire of being great."

"It is a vulgar error of those who say that in Internal
Recollection or Prayer of Rest the faculties operate not, and
the soul is idle and inactive. This is a manifest fallacy, and
belongs to those who have little experience, because although
the mind operates not by means of memory nor by the second

person, that is to say, the limit. ... To return to the universal is to
enlarge, to become divine, not to abolish and lose oneself." Simon, £cole
d'Akxandrie, pp. 156-7, 218.

1 The Spiritual Guide, tr. R. Y. Lynn (with liberties).

THE NEGATIVE PATH 385

operation of the intellect, which is judgment, nor by the third
which is discourse or reasoning, yet it operates by the first
and chief operation of the understanding, which is simple
apprehension enlightened by holy faith, and aided by the
divine gifts of the Spirit ; and the will is more apt to continue
one act than to multiply many, so that the act of the under-
standing as of the will is so simple, imperceptible, and spirit-
ual, that hardly the soul knows it, much less reflects upon it."

These from Teresa :

" In mystical theology, the understanding ceases from its
acts because God suspends it. We must neither imagine nor
think that we can of ourselves bring about this suspense."

" To have the powers of the mind occupied, and to think
that you can keep them at the same time quiet, is folly*
There is no great humility in this (trying to be passive), and
though it be blameless, it carries a sort of punishment after
it, in that it is labor thrown away, and the soul is a little
disgusted : it feels like a man who preparing to take a leap is
held back — he has used up his strength, and is yet unable to
do as he wished."

"What the soul has to do at those seasons is nothing more
than to be gentle and without noise. By noise I mean going
about with the understanding in search of words and reflec-
tions whereby to give God thanks for this grace, and heaping
up its sins and imperfections together to show that it does not
deserve it. Let the will quietly and wisely understand that
it is not by dint of labor on our part that it can converse to
any good purpose with God, and that our efforts are only
great logs of wood laid on without discretion to quench this
little spark."

And these from P^nelon, who had reason to feel the
force of the Quietistic discussion, from both sides, and who
speaks, if not as mystic, yet as a sympathetic arbiter:

386 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

"All passive contemplation reduces itself to something
very simple. It is a tissue of acts of faith and love, so simple,
so direct, so peaceable, and so uniform, that they do not appear
to constitute any action, but a repose of pure union. This is
why St. Francis de Sales wished to reject the term ' union '
for fear of expressing some uniting act on the part of the
soul: he would have it called a simple and pure Unity.
Hence also it is that this contemplation has been called orison
of silence or of quietude ; hence finally that it has been called
passive. God forbid that it should ever be thus described
for sake of excluding the action real, positive, and meritori-
ous of the will, nor acts real and successive which must be
reiterated every moment. It is called passive only to exclude
the self-interested activity or empressement of the mind, when
it is inclined to continue some agitation in order to feel
and see its own operation, which if it were more simple and
unified would be less noticed.'*

"It is passive as a feather is passive, which when dry
responds to every touch of the breeze, but when wet with the
dampness of its own heavy desires shows an inertia which is
felt as a real object. It is passive as the mirror of the lake
is passive, which when its own motion is stilled, is able to re-
turn faithfully the objects whose light falls upon it ; but when
agitated by the breath of its own desires, returns these same
rays in a broken, disordered, and so unintelligible condition."

IV

This, then, is the preparation of the mystic : on the
whole, a negative path ; an activity ending in a volun-
tary passivity, destined to give way in turn to an invol-
untary passivity when God accepts and lifts to himself
the prepared soul. Its history is that of an activity of
self-suppression which must itself be suppressed. And
what, in the end, does it amount to ? Wherein does

THE NEGATIVE PATH 387

it differ from the simple act of thought, the " lifting
of the mind to God"?

First, I should say, and most obviously, in the moral
character of the process, in the ideal of the 'pure heart *
which is recognized as the condition of finding God
in worship.

Second, in the simplification of consciousness. In-
stead of spinning connections, the mystic strives to be
rid of connections, and to reach an object which is
behind and prior to all distinctions. He has practised
recollection, and has become total. He wishes to be,
rather than to think ; assuming that there is a distinc-
tion between being and thinking.

Third, in the repudiation of effort. What the mystic
knows will be empirically known. What the mystic
wills, will be willed by necessity. The worshipper has
exercised his freedom, perhaps the first and last absolute
freedom possessed by the human spirit, to consent to
an empirical apparition of the real.1

The mystic is prepared : what will happen to him ?
Will there be an event ? Will his voluntary passivity
give place to an involuntary passivity; and will he
know that he is one with God ? The mystic has been
knocking at the door of his world, an outsider, prepar-
ing himself inwardly and outwardly, doubtless with a
certain sense of magic and mummery about it all ; as

1 Royce's often-quoted phrase which describes the mystic as the
" thoroughgoing empiricist " is strikingly true of the mystic's method of
knowing. But the mystic's peculiarity is that he applies this method to
objects which empiricists generally insist cannot be given in any such
immediate, unreasoned manner, namely to totals not to elements; to souls,
not to sensations; to resultants (like history, or society) not to factors;
and finally, to God himself.

388 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

of doing things whose reason he does not see, and
which through hidden laws or arbitrary will of the God
will have an effect if they are well done. Yet the true
mystic has known well enough that his experience is no
adventitious effect, but wholly a response to his own
meaning and within his own unbroken idea. If the
effect were magical and external, the mystic would be
thwarted, — he would not consciously have been with
God at all. What he reports is, that he has been
admitted; that from being an outsider, knocking at
the door of things, he has ceased to be an outsider and a
subordinate. He uses the words illumination, union,
sometimes deification, to express what has come to
him. In some way he is admitted to the council of the
maker of this world of things. He has become an
understander of the heart of it. And in evidence of
his truth he is able to walk about among things and
men, — do we say as an alien? — on the contrary, as one
for the first time fully present and at home, able to
recognize himself and God in whatever declares itself,
able to open himself to the whole of experience.

This is what the mystic reports. But having fol-
lowed the course of the mystic's own volition, and
largely in the mystic's own tongue, we must now
seek further light, external light, such as psychology
can furnish, upon the nature of this experience, and
its interpretation.

CHAPTER XXVH
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYSTICISM

WHAT is the experience of the mystic? And
what meaning has that negative path for us of
the present day ? To the mystic, the whole meaning
and logic of worship is personal ; and there is no more
to be said about it than has been said. He has come
consciously into the presence of God, and what is more,
into a unity of will with him. He knows nothing of
any psycho-physical facts which could make clearer the
significance of that event. On the contrary, he seems
to find himself — though perhaps only for a brief
instant — free from the body, wholly " in the spirit,"
where neither mortal thought nor mortal psychology
can follow him. We must allow the mystic the first
word in reporting, and also in interpreting, his experi-
ence. But while he dwells upon its unique, superlative,
indescribable aspects, psychology helps our understand-
ing of that experience by finding what is not unique
about it, what analogies it has in more commonplace
experiences, undertaking thereby both to describe and
to explain it. *

1 The mystic himself, as we have noticed, plays the psychologist so
far as the beginnings of description are concerned; and he alone can prop-
erly inform us of the inner nature of his experience. But his description
offers the clue to concrete analogy ; and this in turn to more scientific
description and explanation.
There is danger, no doubt, in pursuing analogies of what is eesen-

390 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

The mystic experience is unique and free, but not in
the sense that it has no analogies and no ties in the
world of common experience. The fact that these ties
exist is to be seen in the simple circumstance that the
experience is transient.1 For if union with God were
the whole story of mystical experience, there could be
no reason why that moment should pass. The mystic
himself knows very well that his vision cannot last, so
long as he remains a human being.2 Many a mystic
has expressed regret that his joy could not endure, but
none (so far as I have found) has expressed surprise.
This absence of surprise may show that the immediacy
of the experience is never so great as to be wholly free
from outer reference, that some consciousness of the
worldly self and of its ties remains. The mystic has
found himself in a region where the gravitation of earth

tially a religious event. The religiousness of it lies, as the mystic instinc-
tively knows, in what is unique and can be told only in the personal
language of religion. The religious element is always lost among its
many copies, and degraded. Nevertheless, this is the only way in which
the unique can permanently hold us. We must run the risk of this loss;
and when analysis is finished try again to recover the original.

1 It is hardly necessary to recall the familiar description which
William James has given to the class of experiences he proposes to call
mystical : they are ineffable and noetic, usually also transient and passive
(Varieties of religious experience, p. 380 f). In the character of ineffa-
bility, the indescribable quality of the experience becomes a point of
psychological description; and both this ineff ability and the transiency
ore to be explained, as I shall try to show, on psychological grounds.

2 "This sublime condition is not of permanent duration. It is only
DOW and then that we can enjoy this elevation (mercifully made possible
to us) above the limits of the body and the world. I myself have realized
it but three times as yet, and Porphyry not once. All that tends to purify
and elevate the mind will assist you in the attainment, and facilitate the
approach and recurrence of these happy intervals." Vaughan, Hours with
the mystics, voL i, p. 81. An imaginary letter from Plofcinus to a disciple.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYSTICISM 391

operates but slowly; but that it still operates and will
claim its own, lie seems by this silent confession to be
fully aware.

Thus mystic experience comes within the range of
law, and probably also within some law of rhythm.
That is, the mystic's elevation is transient presumably
because it is a phase in some natural rise and fall, some
organic wave perhaps, in experience. If so, this tran-
siency, external character though it is, will offer the
most favorable angle for scientific approach. For any
rhythmic movement in experience reveals not only an
organic bond, but a law of connection as well, through
which the special phase in question is bound in with
the before and the afterward, and begins to be in-
terpreted,1

1 The idea of rhythm with its organic relatedness (causal or other-
wise), need not be wholly alien to the mystic's inner meaning — not more
in regard to the forces that bear him up than in regard to those that hold
him down. The logic of the relation between the worshipper and his
God is indeed wholly personal and particular — not magical — but the
worshipper still relies upon a steadfastness in the being worshipped ; he
frequently comes to look upon his elevation as a response to a right
approach on his part, as some function of the condition of his own heart.
He holds a quasi-natural adjustment o£ attitude to the supernatural.
Meister Eckhart says, " I will never ask God to give himself to me :
I will ask him to make me pure of heart. For if I am pure, God must of
his own nature give himself to me, and flow into me." " Meister eghart
sprach : ich wil got niemer gebitten das er sich mir gebe : ich wil in bitten
das er mich later mache : wan were ich luter, got muest sich mir geben
von siner eigener nature vnd in mich fliessen " ( Wackernagel, Sprtiche
deutscher Mystiker, in Altdeutsches Lesebuch, col. 681). The Spruch
continues : " Wo mit kumet man zuo luterkcit ? rait einem steten iamer
na dem einigen guot, das got ist. Vnt wo mit kumet man in ein jamer ?
mit uernichten aich selben vnt mit missevalle alien creaturen." Thus the
mystic himself is often disposed to read hid experience as a course of
interaction between a higher and a lower law — with an element of human
freedom in the circuit.

392 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

This, at any rate, is what has impressed me in mysti-
cism : That the turning away from the world in the
negative path of worship (together with the mystic
experience itself which marks the limit of the up-swing)
and the turning back again constitute a normal rhythm
or alternation which has many analogies, and a vital
function in the human mind capable of psychological
expression. The marked disconnection between the
mystic experience and the usual level of life, which
obscures both to the mystic and to the observer the
presence of any organic bond between these levels, has
also a psychological meaning. In the present chapter,
I shall do no more than bring forward some of the
analogies which help to interpret (1) the rhythm,
(2) the disconnection, and (3) the unsociality of the
mystic's life circuit. In the next chapter, I shall try
to bring its law to definite terms.

1. Rhythm. — If there is any rhythm in life which
religion, in the observances of worship, follows and
cultivates, it is something more than the simple ebb
and flow of our "animal spirits." Excitement and
depression, high spirits and low spirits, are organic
fluctuations which leave their mark on the religious
life as on all life. Undoubtedly there is a kind of
vision connected with the high places in this vital
rhythm, which resembles, and may actually develop
into, mystical experience. Variations of this kind do
affect most markedly our capacity for fellowship, and
the promptness of that " fusion " with our objects which
we thought characteristic of the mystic consciousness.
I can conceive it possible that the habit of worship

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYSTICISM 393

might take possession of some such subtle wave in our
organic life; but I cannot think, as do certain writers,1
that this type of flux brings us very near the mystic's
experience, and for the following reasons :

First, quasi-mystical moods of this sort are as likely,
perhaps more likely, to come over the mind when the
physique is at low tide ; as in fasting, exhaustion, weak-
ness from loss of blood or insomnia, or in the early stages
of convalescence.

Second, if mystic experience has its rhythm, it shows
little sign of regularity — it is not periodic. The wor-
shipper's will and conscience take part in the affair,
and not the organic wave alone: voluntary decision is
interpolated, as in the circuit of nutrition. It is not
true that mystic experience mechanically follows wor-
ship; there is a certain looseness of connection between
prayer and its answer, which the passivity of the mystic
implies. But the preparation of mind and the act of
consent must enter into the history of the event at some
previous time.

Third, there is no depression which corresponds in
constancy and prominence to the mystic's elevation.
The elevation of the mystic is not in such wise above
normal that it must be compensated by a corresponding
below-normal. On the contrary, it seems to be, in some
sense, another normal. Something of its content and
quality tends to become a permanent possession of con-
sciousness; which would not be the case if it were simply

1 See especially Godfernaux, " Cette oscillation constante dn ton vital
est bien, semble *t il, 1'aspect physiologique propre du sentiment religieux
. . . Quiconque e*prouve le sentiment religieux est un extatique a quelque
degreV' Revue philosophique, vol. 53 (1902), pp. 164,

394 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

an extreme, or " hyper-tension/' There comes a time
in the life of some of the mystics when the vision of
God is, as they assert, a continuous experience, and the
semblance of rhythm disappears.1

These considerations lead me to judge that the mystic's
ascent and return are not to be understood as simply
an unusually pronounced oscillation of vital tone. But
perhaps they also imply that the rhythm itself is unnec-
essary. May not the very circumstance that the meaning
of the mystic experience is to be built into the continuous
level of consciousness, show that the two levels of expe-
rience belong together; that the alternation is accidental,
and to some extent pathological? Delacroix, whose
masterly studies of the mystics put us all in his debt,
inclines to regard whatever rhythm there is as something
to be overcome; and as something that is overcome
in the long experience of the greater mystics.2 After
much painful experiment and mistake, such persons
as Teresa, Madame Guyon, and Suso, emerge into a
period of serene and powerful activity, from which the
fitfulnessj the heights and depths, the interruptions
and disturbances, of the earlier enthusiastic devotions
have disappeared.

But I must doubt whether this alternation is essentially
pathological or whether it is ever overcome : I must doubt

1 " My soul is, as it were, in a fortress with authority, and accord*
ingly does not lose its peace . . . The imaginary visions have ceased, but
the intellectual vision of the Three Persons and of the Sacred Humanity
seems ever present." Teresa to the Bishop of Osma, May 1581. " Cette
vie divine devient toute naturelle a I'&me . . . Ici I'oraison est Faction; et
1'action est 1'oraison: tout est e*g&l, tout est indifferent a cette fime . . .
Ici 1'extase se fait pour toujours et non pour des heures." Madame
Guyon, Torrents 232, 246. Quoted by Delacroix. Etudes, 143, 148.

* Etudes d'histoire et de psychologic du mysticisme, esp. ch, ii, vi, xi.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYSTICISM 395

it if only from the fact that worship and mystic experi-
ence involve an exclusive occupation of attention which
in the nature of the case is incompatible with simulta-
neous attention to other affairs, and vice versa. " When
attention is turned in one of these directions, it is in
some degree withdrawn from the other. I cannot at
the same moment be conceiving of God as the only
being of worth, and yet of my life — this fragmentary
life — as itself a matter of worth. I alternate. . . .
(One) requires a certain narrowing of his vision, a certain
exclusion of the infinite aspects of his task, in order to
perform that task well." Thus Professor Palmer states
the situation.1 If worship has any vital function to
perform, it must alternate with other things, the necessity
of rhythm lies somehow in the nature of my practical
attention.2

1 G. H. Palmer, The Field of Ethics, pp. 181, 173.

2 The mystics found various ways for expressing a belief that some
such alternation is not a matter of choice, but a result of the structure of
human nature; as in such words as these:

" Now the created soul of man hath also two eyes. The one is the
power of seeing into eternity, the other of seeing into time and the crea-
tures, of perceiving how they differ from each other as aforesaid, of giving
life and needful things to the body, and ordering and governing it for the
best. But these two eyes of the soul of man cannot both perform their
work at once; but if the soul shall see with the right eye into eternity,
then the left eye must close itself and refrain from working, and be as
though it were dead. For if the left eye be fulfilling its office toward
outward things; that is, holding converse with time and the creatures;
then must the right eye be hindered in its working; that is, in its contem-
plation. Therefore, whosoever will have the one must let the other go."
Theologia Germanica, Winkworth, ch. vii.

To Flotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius, the two alternate directions of the
mind had a metaphysical meaning: they symbolized the emanation and
reflux which were supposed to make up the cosmic history; and more than
this, they were parts of that cosmic rhythm itself.

Ffoelon has his usual judicious comments to make on the notion of per-

396 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

I am driven therefore to look for further analogies
among those normal alternations such as sleeping and
waking, work and recreation, conflict and co-operation,
society and solitude, hungers and satisfactions of various
types. The fact that much of the early elevation is
built into the later level of continuous living may he
interpreted, in no very far-fetched manner perhaps, as
akin to the assimilation of a meal. The experience
seems in fact to have supplied the subject with a certain
moral fuel as well as with cognitive material. His ina-
bility to bring its content to immediate expression is to
be understood by the fact that this supply is still rela-
tively external to him and requires a normal interval to
be made his own ; as in time it is made his own. Rhythm
of this type would then last at any rate as long as the
subject continues to grow. Approximate continuity is
a sign of old age in mysticism; just as the gradual
obliteration of the sharp rhythm of sleep and waking is a
sign of physiological old age. Alternation lies deep in
the nature of things psychical as well as physiological :
it is the fundamental method of growth. I am inclined,
therefore, to regard the mystic experience as a normal
incident in the attainment of a new psychical level;
and no exceptional incident, but one which in various

petual orison, or "spiritual marriage." " There is such a thing in this
life as a state habitual, though not entirely invariable, in which the most
perfect spirits perform all their deliberate action in the presence of God,
and for love of him . . . This referring of all voluntary action to our
unique end is the perpetual orison enjoined by Christ, and by Saint Paul
when he said, Pray without ceasing. But this orison should never be con-
founded with contemplation pure and direct (which) has not the same
species of perpetuity: because it is often interrupted by acts of the
various virtues necessary to all Christians." Explication des maximes
des saints, Art. xxv.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYSTICISM 397

forms and degrees is a recurrent event in every per-
son's life.

This may stand as a rude hypothesis which will place
mystic experience in an organic relation to the rest of
life. We may sharpen this conception by considering
now the relative discontinuity which seems to exist
between mystic experience and the ordinary level.

2. Disconnection. — The traditional religious mystic
reaches a point of ecstasy in which he is as thoroughly
detached from his waking world as is the sleeper. And
as in the case of sleep, this disconnection follows upon
a voluntary effort to be effortless, when his preparation
has put him into the hands of some agency beyond
himself. The absorbed thinker is also detached from
the world, and the absent-minded man, and the person
who falls into a "brown study": in some respects, the
mystic's abstraction more resembles these than the lax-
ity of sleep. But again, as in the case of sleep the sac-
rifice of time and of complete active consciousness is
regarded as a natural means of conserving both life
and time, so the mystic may be justified in regarding,
as he does, his self-abandonment as a paradoxical
necessity, not more remarkable than sleep, for main-
taining his spiritual integrity.

Disconnection is the aspect of mysticism which the
observer is most inclined to resent and condemn as
abnormal. The mystic, on the other hand, has prized
it most highly : for to be " carried away " is the chief
sign that supernature has taken the place of nature*
But both the critical observer and the mystic might
profit by considering that the element of "mystery" or

398 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

"ineffableness" in mystic experience is largely if not
completely due to the fact of disconnection alone, not
to any inherent mysteriousness or unnaturalness in the
content of the experience. Psychologically, mystery is
felt whenever there are two bodies of experience not in
perfect communication, quite apart from the question
whether the one or the other is inherently wonderful or
weird. Mystery does not lie in either of the two bodies
by itself ; it expresses the effort of each to make terms
with the other, and the beginning of success. It is the
state of mind of one who begins to see. Mystery is
thus the characteristic quality of every incipient idea,
not yet wholly seized by the mind. And the mystic
may be regarded, I think, as one who is confronted
quite empirically with a body of new experience and
idea in such wise that he is a possessor of two bodies
of experience, neither of which he can doubt: both
must be true, and he does not understand how both
are true.

This is no uncommon state of mind. Such an expres-
sion as the following seems to me quite typically mys-
tical: "How came this creation so magically woven that
nothing can do me mischief but myself? ... If I will
stand upright, the creation cannot bend me/' Here
stands Emerson with the weight of appearances against
him, sure of "the creation," yet equally sure of his
own immunity ; confessing that he cannot understand
how both assurances can be woven into one fabric, —
using therefore the word "magical." The mystic might
be broadly described as the man who is willing to drop
one world of assurance while he seizes another, confident
that reality will harmonize them both, though he cannot

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYSTICISM 399

yet grasp the idea which does harmonize them. Inabil-
ity to bring the two experiences together tends, it is
true, to cast doubt for a time upon the reality of the
one not present: and the religious mystic is one for
whom another world than this, or another stratum of
experience, has gained such substantial certainty that
the reality of everyday experience must suffer this kind
of passing doubt. But the true mystic is he who holds
to the reality of both worlds, and leaves to time and
effort the understanding of their union. This kind of
discontinuity in experience (such in part as Emerson
pleads for in his arraignment of anxious consistency)
seems to me a condition of mental soundness and health,
as well as of mental growth.

There is some deep-going practical principle here
concerned, whose existence we can note without at
present trying to determine its law. It is a principle
which suspends the operation of the ideals of reason,
from time to time, without in the least questioning or
supplanting those ideals. We must have consistency
in the end; we must have connectedness; we must
have unity : but for the sake of having this ultimate
unity and order, anarchy and discontinuity must have
their moment. That sort of self-possession which is
made of continuous rationality must be held subject to
self-abandonment, when the hour of empirical truth
arrives. And the hour of truth is always present.
Idolaters of self-possession, as we are : do we not see
that every pulse of consciousness is full of the tumult
and wonder of these plunges into the ununified and
returns therefrom? that sensing, listening, accepting
the hint of any honest emotion, every merest decision

400 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

such as the instants of living are made up of — all of
these involve some commitment to the unknown, some
such willing embrace of a momentarily broken ration-
ality ? The emotion itself is but the call of the new
idea which has its overt connections yet to make with
this system of mine ; passion is but a more impetuous
commitment to an insight of larger scope and of larger
destructive (and reconstructive) implications. All enthu-
siasms, whether of devotion or anger or love or courage,
are alike in this : all alike spurn continuity and seize
the insight which the moment offers as a new world of
truth, whose unity with the old may be cared for in
due time. And has not passion also such a tide as
the mystic knows, which after the critical moment of
consent substitutes its own motion for the will, now
apparently passive, of the worshipper? Some cult of
discontinuity, strongly resembling the mystic's breach
with the world, we may thus see everywhere in the inti-
mate working of our mental life. The disconnection
which the mystic practises is so far countenanced, and
vaguely explained.

The mystic, we may say, simply brings his discontin-
uity into the open and makes an avowed principle of it.
We see why it is that no person whose god is conven-
tion and self-rule can be a mystic. In the typical
mystic temperament we expect to find a certain open-
ness of spirit, such as readily accepts a present inspira-
tion as its law. The encasements of mental attitude in
such persons are never fast-set : the limberness of their
inner substance promises well for continuance of growth.
At his worst, the mystic is impulsive and childish ; at
his best he retains something of childhood, its tender-

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYSTICISM 401

ness, its freshness of impression, its unsatiated wonder,
its generosity : he has that simplicity and teachableness
which are found in the very young and the very great.
He may, for this reason, be a demonstrative person
(the " gift of tears " was once regarded as a saintly
attribute) ; or he may, for the same reason, seem to live
in perpetual calm : in any case, he is one whose attach-
ment in the Absolute is so secure that he has no fear in
embracing any insight which can gain the consent of
that side of his consciousness, though for the present it
can claim no other. (Here perhaps we begin to break
through into the theory of the mystic disconnectedness,
and the continuity behind it; but we shut that prospect
for the present, and return to our psychology.)

Some degree of openness to discontinuity in experi-
ence is evidently a part of deeper practical wisdom.
But does this general principle, whatever it may be,
valid for these partial ventures in experience, — does
this principle explain or justify such radical and total
disconnection as the mystic practises ? For the mystic,
strictly speaking, is the man whose disconnection is
made between the whole system of things and ideas
temporal on the one side, and the heart of the eternal
on the other : whereas the subdued " mysticism " of our
ordinary life merely flits from one body of ideas to
another within that world-system. Radical mysticism,
religious mysticism, with its sweeping negation and
equally sweeping affirmation, seems to sever a man from
his fellows as well as from nature : it tends to make
him solitary, anti-social, and useless ; to give him over
to subjectivity. We are not inclined in our time to
rate highly any solitary aspect of religious thought or

402 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

practice. And yet I incline to think that just this
radical social disconnection is also an essential part
of mysticism.

3. Solitude. — All thoroughgoing mysticism is soli-
tary, so far as human companionship is concerned : we
must first be clear about that. There are phenomena
of religious history that look much like mass-mysticism,
and have been interpreted as such : religious dances,
dramas, festivals, revivals, in which the white-heat of
social consciousness becomes the generator of mystical
enthusiasms. But even in these somewhat tumultuous
and disorderly variations of our theme, the mass-con-
sciousness forms the level from which the individual
departs : he is not a mystic until his own spirit has
made its solitary leap to Grod, like a tongue of flame
out of the midst of the fire.

Much of what we call " social life " moves on a sim-
ilar principle — that of passing from hand to hand a
function which in any one hand is a solitary function :
each one in turn becomes "it," takes upon himself alone
the difficulty in question, learning by his own experi-
ence what otherwise he sees only from the outside.
Whoever helps to sustain any social structure is alone
just in so far as he is responsible : and he comes, for the
most part, to his solitary social position through having
wrestled with some angel in more literal isolation from
other human ken* The initiate must go down alone
into the grave ; though initiation is on the whole a
social ceremony. And so, whether we have in mind an
orgy of Dionysus or a meeting of the society of Friends,
it is individual seizure by the spirit which marks the

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYSTICISM 403

moment of religious success.1 We do not understand
solitude until we see that it can ride on the back of any
whirl of sociality however furious ; its pang may be the
more poignant because the utmost limit of common
possession has been tested in an immediately preceding
moment. He who merely imitates is but a false mystic
— for the thing to be imitated is a burst of original
impulse: he who is entranced by social suggestion is
but a false mystic — for the inner core of what his
social environment requires of him is the violent subdual
of the social bond by the superior energy of the divine
rapport. He alone is utterly unsocial who refuses
when him own watch comes to go out and meet the abso-
lute in the darkness. Solitude, I say, is the essence of
mysticism : and, I add, the basis of its supreme social
importance.

For it is the most dangerous things that are the most
important. We of this age have come to fear solitude
and with it all mysticism because solitude is the home
of stagnant growths and morbid consciousness, because
it is the crowning curse of all vices and itself a vice
even in religion. We see in it only the danger of los-
ing objectivity, which is indeed its essential peril. But
consider the mystic's intention, which after all is the
thing to be judged : his intention is that his absolute

1 Though the early ascetics of Egypt lived iu communities, their
dwellings appour to have been individual, and each had its place for entire
solitude. W. M.F. Potrio, Personal Religion iu Egypt, p. 68. The same
is true of the early monks of Ireland, so I am told by Mr. C. A. Bennett,
who supplies uie with the following note: " With many of their establish-
ments were connected ' diserts,' lonely spots iu woods or mountains, to
which from time to time the individual monk might retire for solitary
meditation, fasting, and prayer. The cenobitic never wholly replaced the
eremitic ideal in Ireland." Of. Gougaud, Les Chre'tientes Oeltiques, pp.
103-104.

404 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

Object shall gain in strength pari passu with his entrance
into himself. Mysticism in its true character is pre-
cisely the redemption of solitude: it is the process
which enters one step farther than we have yet explored
into the heart of our own infinite subjectivity, and
reclaims that new increment for the general use, in the
form first of a deepened morality and art. If our own
age with its growing sociality and immersion in the
manifold is little mystical, it is also true of it that the
power of evaluating solitude and therewith the depth of
self-consciousness is little developed : in so far as this
age of ours has flattened and shallowed out, it is because
it has so far lost its mystical instincts.

I cannot doubt that the value which attaches to the
partial discontinuities of living in our spiritual economy
attaches also to the complete disconnection which the
typical religious mystic practises : the latter is governed
by the same law as the former. We cannot live well, I
judge, unless there is something in our lives which offers
us from time to time the possibility of absolute detach-
ment and solitude : that which is necessary and useful
in part is necessary and useful also in whole. The
mystic is simply the person who does consciously and
with the whole man that which we are all doing spon-
taneously and in fragmentary fashion in every moment
of our effective living. Doubtless, then, the rhythm of
mystic experience has its law, such as will place it with
the other normal rhythms of experience. But as the
mystic rhythm is the most comprehensive of all, I shall
refer to this law simply as the principle of alternation ;
and shall now try to state its meaning.

CHAPTER XXVm

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MYSTICISM (continued) — THE
PRINCIPLE OF ALTERNATION

ri 1HE principle of alternation, so far as the program
J- of daily living is concerned, is neither abstruse nor
unknown. Of the various goods which go to make up
a balanced existence, we naturally treat each in turn as
if it were a sole and sufficient object ; we do not under-
take to pursue them all, or many, at once. All good
things do doubtless belong together; but each good
thing, we recognize, is to be pursued separately. The
difficulty lies in inferring from the parts to the whole :
that is to say, in seeing that the alternation which is
obviously necessary as between one partial object and
another is also necessary as between all partial objects
and the whole. But just this, I think, is what worship
means : that the whole must become a separate object
of pursuit, taking its turn as if it also were a part, as if
it were another among the many goods of practical
occupation. Let me illustrate this principle as we com-
monly recognize it among these many partial interests,
and then carry it on to the total alternation of religion.

We may best appreciate the principle of alternation
by what it is contrasted with, the principle, namely,
tiat all things belong together and should be pursued

406 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

together. To this contrasting principle we pay much
respect : old dualisms as between soul and body, form
and matter, God and world, have become tabooed iu
practice as they have become obsolete in theory. We
believe in the concrete, in the soul that is one with body,
the God that is immanent in the world : and we are
inclined to make practical programs according to this
belief. If soul and body belong together, we must
cultivate both together. If man and woman belong
together, we must educate both together. If all beauty
is one beauty, then the highest art will be composite —
we must have perfumed music, dramatic music, Wag-
nerian opera, or in German fashion, music with beer,
Gemiitlichkeit, and a fine outlook. But for the most
part some sense of fitness saves us from turning our
concrete doctrine too thoroughly into a program. Our
inferences become fantastic ; and without abandoning
our belief in the concrete, we recognise a fundamen-
tal dualism or pluralism in the necessities of conduct
Eeflection and action belong together, but we cannot
carry on both at once, with success : each best finds its
due influence on the other if each has its time of whole*
hearted attention. We cannot endure form without
substance, whether in men or books or things, nor sub-
stance without form; these also belong together and
perfection in either will bring perfection in both : but
not waiting for perfection in either, each must be
acquired in its own way and time, by some degree of
separate attention. In larger concerns, liberty and
authority belong together : but in the course of history
an expansion of one alternates with an expansion of the
other, each developing characteristic abuses, preparing

THE PRINCIPLE OF ALTERNATION 407

the way for an outburst of the other with more or less
disturbance and passion.

The whole man, in short, is not to be found in any
one moment — nor in any one man. The dreamer and
the man of affairs are forever finding their way together;
the spirit of peace is forever breeding with the spirit of
war, in more successful syntheses of character : * yet
specialization has its infinite work to do, — the concrete
is its deposit, not its occupation.

So it is with all the antithetical goods of the world ;
and so presumably is it also with that most comprehen-
sive antithesis between God and the whole world of
visible work. I believe in the "concrete universal" as
a metaphysical doctrine; God and the world belong
together — neither is anything without the other : but
from this true generality it no more follows than in the
above practical matters that God and the world can yet
be best known or won together. The concrete univer-
sal cannot either in this case or in any other be forthwith
made into a maxim for historical conduct. God and the
world, I maintain, must be worked in with one another
forever: forever they must be pursued in alternation.
We have now to follow out this theory.

II

In every art we recognize a distinction between tech-
nique and spirit. We care little for one without the
other j yet we know that technique has its own right,

1 In classic times, the pursuits of commerce and city life actually
unfitted men for fighting; the antique contempt for the merchant was based
in part upon a psychological fact. To-day, commerce has its good quota
of combativencss ; and an industrial country is never without an efficient
army.

408 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

and must be cultivated, as if for technique's sake alone :
the spirit has its own moment, in the intervals of tech-
nical study, — and the spirit represents the whole. Here
the whole alternates with the parts.

The art of winning knowledge is not different from
other arts in this respect. We know what the tools for
intellectual discovery are — facts in infinite variety and
extent, measurements, classifications, knowledge of all
existing theories: he who would win truth must fill
himself as full as possible of science, of history, of
social motives, of the immense richness of the cosmos.
But we know too that there comes a moment when
these very things, his necessary means, become his
poisons: this is the moment at which they become him-
self. The man becomes identical with his learning, is
nothing but his learning: he cannot use it because he
has lost sight of the thing it is not, he has forgotten
what it is for. His technique cannot serve him unless
he can see beyond it. That self must be withdrawn
and re-oriented: it must turn its back upon itself, and
revert to the whole.

This practical necessity is embedded in the very cat-
egories with which science carries on its work. It is in
the psychology of our knowing processes that we find
the barest and simplest view of this alternation in which
the whole is one member. For as a process in time,
knowing has to ply not only from fact to fact, from
part to part of experience, but also between all such
parts and some conception of the whole. Beside all the
work of observation there is the work of hypothesis,
the alternation between induction and deduction, laying
hold on a whole and returning from the whole to the

THE PRINCIPLE OF ALTERNATION 409

several parts.1 The scientist is occupied with phenom-
ena ; but beside the phenomena, the concept of substance
in some form or other (whether of matter, or energy,
or law, or soul) must take a place as one other object
of necessary attention. Any concrete knowledge of a
society, a race, an age, etc., must be reached by a
similar interplay of categories: beside the extending
of knowledge, there must be a deepening of knowl-
edge, an attempt to grasp the ' spirit' of things, their
principle, formula, essence, — in brief, their one, their
whole. It is not otherwise with our knowledge of
individual men. If I wish to know a person, I must
pursue acquaintance in two antithetical directions: I
must learn to know him in what he does, at his periph-
ery, in the various expressions of his action in the
world of our common objects; and I must also learn
to know him by the pursuit of his central * substance/
by the intuitive seizure in intimacy of the unity from
which all these plural deeds are derived.

And knowledge of the greater whole evidently follows
the same principle as the knowledge of these lesser

1 There is a tendency among logicians at present to make a concrete
of induction and deduction as of everything else ; and to assert that
neither process exists apart from the other. Ostwald asserts that there
is no deductive science, but there is wohl a deductive procedure, which
must be understood in connection with induction* Well, let it be so :
there is an inductive procedure and a deductive procedure, and these are
two different procedures, and do in the history of research alternate with
each other. That is all ; whether we draw the lines of any science cleanly
about one or the other procedure is of no consequence. The alterna-
tion itself will never be wiped out. Analogically speaking, the quest of
induction is scientific prayer; and the discovery of a whole, in answer to
such prayer, a scientific mystical experience. Inductions are not to be
taken by violence, they are received in passivity. The question of induc-
tion is treated further in chapter xxxi below.

410 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

wholes. My world at its periphery is ' experience/
'life'; at its center it is c substance/ ' reality/ ' God/
We must know both aspects in turn, and conceive them
as we can together. My total picture of this world is
drawn like an artist's sketch — not by a line continuous
and adequate in the field of vision, but by a series of
lines which err, and which are broken in their course by
recurrence to the (undrawn) idea. God is in the world,
no doubt : the plural and visible aspect of things is
divine also — that is, if we are able to see it so. But
if we are to prosper in such an interpretation of the
world (which certainly sets upon that world a high
value) we need from time to time to have caught the
original meaning of ' divinity ' in some immediate experi-
ence.1 We must recur to the whole.

Herewith we come upon the principle of alternation
in its full meaning, which is best seen in the history of
the will. In all our practical living we human beings
are pursuing some total good under shapes and by
means which are inadequate to it, and so partly false to
it. We are obliged from time to time to reject what

1 It is not accurate to say that we are unable to hold in a single view
the many and the one, the appearances and the reality, the periphery and
the center, the world and God. To some extent we must do this: in
attending to the many, we may not lose sight of the one, at the risk of
losing the many also; and in attending to the one we may not lose sight
of the many, at the risk of the vanishing of tho one. The one must
always be known as the one of these many. The situation is rather this:
that in the process of attending to and dealing with the many, the vision
of the One tends to vanish and must be renewed by empirical presence of
its object Likewise, in lifting the mind to the One, the sense of the
many, with which the One must be thought, tends to fade, and God loses
all meaning to the mind that regards him. The exclusive direction of the
mind whether to the many or to the One is a self-destroying process :
whereas the alternating of attention may be a self-developing process.

THE PRINCIPLE OF ALTERNATION 411

we have done, to withdraw our forward-moving efforts,
and revert to the whole : not because of the fact of
error (for there are errors which may be remedied on
the spot without change of direction), but because of
the type of error, — it is an error which involves not
only our tools, but our selves, the operators. We begin
to get into our own way and so to defeat our own work.
We can find no radical remedy except in getting rid of
that self ; and no radical way of abandoning that self
except by reverting to the whole.1

This is, in outline, the meaning of the principle of
alternation. There is something about our practical
attention to any part or parts which turns self-defeating,
and requires such complete abandonment of the parts,
and reversion to the whole as religion has demanded,
that whole which is different from all parts. And there
is also something about practical attention to the whole

1 The principle of alternation is the supplement of the principle of
relativity both of knowing and of willing Both principles, of alternation
and of relativity, are historical principles : they apply, that is, to blowing,
not to knowledge. It is not knowledge that is relative ; it is the temporal
act of knowing. It is my momentary position as a being in time and
space which determines that at any moment I may see but one side of a
shield — and this limitation I cannot overcome. But such knowledge of
the whole as I have leads me by alternating my position to repair the
defect of my historical knowing. Now knowledge of the whole, such as
guides this alternation between relative parts, is also a matter of degree*
And in so far as I fail to overcome my relativity at any point, or find
myself sinking deeper into it, I am forced to turn away from all parts,
and directly seek a whole that will place them. Thus I alternate between
whole and parts, and thereby transcend relativities as they make them-
selves felt. Every detail of psychical life shows this method of action.
Attention in its minuter physiology is a rapidly alternating process, per-
petually withdrawn from its object and instantaneously replaced; in the
instant of its withdrawal having recovered a better poise and a steadier
termination, having wiped away the film of relativity with which self and
object had begun to obscure each other.

412 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

which turns self-defeating, and can only be recovered
by occupation with the parts. Hence the movement
of our temporal life must swing between them. But
in order to see more clearly what is meant by this
" reverting to the whole/7 we must look deeper into
that self-defeating tendency which makes this alterna-
tion necessary.

J III

It is a matter of common observation that every
human effort produces something it does not want;
and this by-product sooner or later checks the effort.
We may even say that every effort produces something
of the opposite of what it aims at : the strain to see
brings blindness ; the strain to think brings absence of
mind; strained self -consciousness brings loss of self-
possession ; careful calculation invites failure ; scrupu-
lous morality develops the immoral ; high aims bring
specialization and deformity. These are facts, but what
is the reason for them ?

The reason, as I see it, lies as far back in the nature
of things as the fact that the soul of man has a body,
appears in space, and works out its destiny in time.
Whatever is the cause and meaning of our physical
existence, that same cause makes our temporal efforts
self-checking and that same cause requires us to recover
our spiritual integrity by bringing the whole down
among the parts, and treating it as a thing of time and
space like ourselves.

That which makes existence in time important to
spirits such as we are is the power of voluntary attenr
tion : it is the specific mark of our individual selfhood,
and it is also the place of our freedom* All the work

THE PRINCIPLE OP ALTERNATION 413

of life, with its manifold interests, can be described as
the sphere of our voluntary attention and action. This
characteristic marks off all our occupation with the parts
from our occupation with the whole in worship, which
in the mystic experience itself becomes passive, that is
to say, effortless. The contrast between mystic experi-
ence and tf life ' is at the same time a contrast between
effortless attention and effortful attention. But in this
effortful attention we find the chief mark of our per-
sonal liberty ; and it is just this liberty which is bought
with the great price of artificiality, and separation
from nature.

For in this voluntary business of life, we are not
merely pursuing a good which is already made ; we are
constructing our good, we are making good. That
same absolute good which the mystic simply finds,
appears to our common action as something which we
can win only by making it our own, reproducing it, or
realizing it by our own labors. All practical life may
thus further be described as a transition from a self
that is given to us (by birth or otherwise) to a made-
self. And it is here that we inevitably separate our-
selves from nature. For all such practical constructive
effort must have its plan, its aims, its standards ; and
whatever aims and standards we self-consciously adopt
and define to ourselves as 'our good' are so many
theories, types, generalities, — never quite the whole
truth. Since we must model our conduct on some
definite plan, the practical will is necessarily theo-
retical, and so far, abstract, incomplete.1 We gain

1 The will works in the concrete — that is true. But what it con-
sciously sots up in the concrete world are its own ideas, mouldings and

414 WORSHIP ANu THE MYSTICS

firmness in the saddle of practical self-possession only
by condemning to death a certain margin of our
consciousness.1

This inherent defect in the operation of voluntary
attention becomes more pronounced and radical as effort
continues ; simply because every voluntary effort, assum-
ing as it must that its standards are adequate, that it
knows what it wants, strengthens the assumption by
acting upon it, and so deepens the breach between the
artificial self and the natural self. We are never occu-
pied with any object without becoming to some degree
fascinated by that object and assimilated to it ; as the
object is partial, so we who deal with it become partial.2
As a conscious, self-making agent, " the individual is
always wrong " ; yet, just as such a free, effortful, self-
making agent, the individual must always assume that
he is right.

We are thus, by " our finite situation," bound in a
predicament from which our active selves cannot shake
free, though the ultimate knower in us is not involved
in it. Ambition and duty, all use of conscious freedom,
all work, in short, develops of itself an inner opposition,
or spiritual checkage. For this loss of margin, as the
artificial self becomes identified with its own assump-
tions and objects, is a progressive impoverishment of

improvements upon a given reality, pseudo-individual objects, imitations
of the concrete. Never yet has the conscious will of man constructed by
its own effort alone a living being* Our explicit practicality, I repeat, is
theoretical and abstract.

1 Here commences the building of " subconsciousness " See the
note on this subject at the end of the book.

2 This is the "relativity" to which the human will is subject ; we
cannot act in the world of matter without becoming material ; we cannot
use our freedom without becoming to some degree a thing.

THE PRINCIPLE OF ALTEENATION 415

that whole-idea, whose use, as we thought/ gives all
objects what value they have. In order that my various
practical enterprises should go on well, it is necessary
that my various ends should maintain their worth;
and in order that they may hold their worth and inter-
est, my whole-idea must be active in all my occupa-
tions — I must be thinking with my whole-idea, and
efficiently- But the incident o£ voluntary activity
is to undermine the effectiveness of this whole-idea.2
And the result is a spiritual fatigue, analogous to, but
neither identical nor contemporaneous with, physical
fatigue.3

The symptoms of this spiritual checkage are not hard
to recognize* They are simply the inevitable assump-
tions of action become hardened into fixed illusions.
We find ourselves in the first place regarding the several
objects of our pursuit as though they were absolute,
real in themselves and good in themselves ; and we
cannot see them otherwise than with this exaggerated
importance. We cannot bear to lose any of them ; for
every loss is a dead loss. And if we win, we are still
dissatisfied, for every gain, too, is a dead gain, reaching
no further in its value than the object then and there

l Seo above, chapter xL

8 Deliberate narrowing of the range of idea, in one's occupation with
the part, is the essence of sin. Freedom may thus add to the breach
between natural self and artificial self a positive barrier. For the present
we may ignore this farther element in the "separation between man and
God."

8 No donbt this fatigue of the idea is also physical in the same way
that all spiritual limitation is physical I that Is to say, there is a physio*
logical expression for it. It is none the less a concern primarily of ideas;
it has a necessity of the same order as that which makes us temporal
beings at all. In the end it is a matter of religion, and can only be suc-
cessfully approached from the religious quarter.

416 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

gained, leaving infinite further gains to be made- No
gain is so great as to seem to me a gain of the whole,
My world of will-objects has become pluralistic;
and my practical problem has become essentially hope-
less. Another symptom is criticism. For all work
and construction must be critical, that is, selective. All
voluntary activity takes up the critical attitude toward
what is, and resolves to bring about something better,
by first conceiving something better. The practical
temper has to separate the good from the bad: and
since its world has taken on this pluralistic and abso-
lute appearance, the good qualities and the bad qualities
of things and of men seem independent of each other.
We think that we can have the one without the other
and we insist on it. We have no interest in a possible
union of the good and the bad ; we draw a clean line
between them ; we are condemnatory and exacting, for
the sake of our own standards. We grow mighty in
discrimination, and terrible : we grow puny in synthesis
and creative power. A further consequence and
symptom is that our responsible temper finds nothing
in the present that satisfies it. It is alienated from its
present moment: it is romantic., in the sense that it
seeks its good elsewhere, far away, in a place very dif-
ferent from anything it finds in experience. As the
over-prepared, over-equipped, over-trained person, with
his eye habitually fixed on some future moment as the
moment of his action, is indeed prepared for everything
except for the judgment " Now is the time " ; so the
soul over-steeped in actual work loses capacity to believe
in the presence of the good worked for. Its sympathy
flows forth with difficulty ; and that attitude of " fusion"

THE PRINCIPLE OF ALTERNATION 417

which we were recently describing as mystical in char-
acter, finds little scope for exercise. The one and good
is not here — that is all.

All of these common symptoms of spiritual fatigue,
I repeat, are nothing more than the habitual assump-
tions of action taken as whole truth. They picture
nothing but the abstracted soul of the active man ; the
common materialism of strenuosity, deepened into a
belief in the " abstract universal." All these symptoms
sum themselves up in this: that I find nothing indi-
vidual in my world. I find no present particular of
which I can say — Here is the standard embodied: I
find no object in which my whole-idea, with its high
power of synthesis of good and bad, can find end-
less occupation. My universals have parted company
with particulars. I find illustrations of value ; things
good in this respect and bad in that ; specimens of
general concepts ; but no individual.

And losing contact with the really individual aspect
of the world beyond me, I also lose contact with the
individual in myself. My artificial self becomes the
only self I am acquainted with. This self is built up
according to self-conscious standards of criticism, uni-
versal in character, derived largely from my social con-
sciousness, and passing current in the world just because
I have thus dutifully universalized myself. It is a well-
known selfhood — known, in fact, through and through,
empty of mystery — well-behaved also, conventionally
confirmed in its own successful technique of self -hand-
ling, the man of the city and of the world ; betraying at
every point the failure of privacy, of recourse to the indi-
vidual I am, the sealing of spontaneity, the formal hard*-

418 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

ening of the heart, the unhumauizing of men by over-
contact with humanity, the strain of general attitudes
not wholly naturalized in oneself.

To live thus with the universal, the abstract univer-
sal of action, and with one's own artificial and dutiful
embodiments thereof, is the beginning of death.

IV

The effort of work, then, provides for its own arrest
Work, simply as a voluntary application of ideas, does
gradually disintegrate those values for which alone work
exists. In all literalness life ceases to be worth living,
and death in some shape will be sought. Into the
midst of all effort, dutiful or otherwise, there must fall
soon or late a sense of the aimlessness of work, a ques-
tioning and denial of worth-whileness, a consciousness
of moral wear and tear in the determined pursuit of
objects whose value is not wholly convincing, a need
for recovering sincerity and spiritual poise.

And this new-born need, still of the same moral stuff
that first launched the work, now reverses the direction
of action, and turns naturally toward some object whose
value is convincing without any effort, toward enjoyment
in some form or other. Pleasure, recreation, friendship,
the companionship of men and women, beauty — all
these recall the outgoings of ambition and moral effort,
and reunite a man with his natural appreciation. Some-
thing in common these all have with the quest of the
mystic, and with the mystic experience itself. And
worship is the whole which includes them all.

It is not primarily external failure which brings man
to worship. It is simply the internal decay of the incen-

THE PRINCIPLE OF ALTERNATION 419

tive of work, the drooping of the sails of ambition, the
falling out of humor with one's own humor, the mys-
terious vanishing of the raison d'etre of life as a sphere
for the theoretical will.1 And whatever recovers the
worth of living by recovering the natural mcjar of the
whole-idea is worship, or a part of worship.

It may not be at once obvious how worship is related
to all these other means for recovering our values ? —
there is much here that has no resemblance to worship,
nor any visible need of it. For spiritual as well as for
bodily fatigue, physical nature has its simple advice to
give, and ancient human experience its rule of thumb.
As the Egyptian proverb has it, " The archer hitteth
the target, partly by pulling, partly by letting go; the
boatsman reacheth the landing, partly by pulling, partly
by letting go." 2 No man can earn the good by con-
sciously mastering all its conditions ; so the race long
ago found out. Critical responsibility must be limited ;
physiology and the self-righting mechanisms of the
world mxist do what self-consciousness fails and will
always fail to accomplish. All such counsels of pas-
sivity, laissez faire, partial death, are parts of practical
wisdom and have no apparent necessary connection with
religion.

But these things all need religion to finish them just
because they are relatively un-self-conscious. Our free
and self-conscious personality ought not to be satisfied,
and cannot be satisfied, with a restoration purely by

1 All these, taken together with the sense of one's own responsibility
for the result, i. e., that it is due to self-assertion. The sense of sin re-reads
and complicates, but does not essentially alter, the problem.

* Instructions of Ftah Hotep to his son.

420 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

mechanism or by laissez faire. In fact there can be
no such thing as a recovery of value which is essentially
physiological or subconscious ; the idea must be recov-
ered as an idea, that is to say, consciously and inten-
tionally,1 Worship, we may say, is the self-conscious
part of the natural recovery of value ; it is that part,
therefore, which assigns all other parts their place and
meaning.

Sleep wins our consent without offering any account
of its method or meaning — or perhaps a minimum
account. In the pursuit of pleasure there is something
more of the positive and intentional. To pleasure,
friendly association, and art we turn still blindly and
instinctively ; but with some dawning grasp of the idea
in what we do. There is a free and deliberate element
in the reversal of action. In all of these we perceive
the play of the universal in the particular, a natural
union of the two given without effort, and rejoining us
with the individual element in our experience.3 But in

1 This implies that in the complete alternation there is something of
the voluntary self which is not abandoned : if this self is to know the
meaning of its own recovery, it cannot be wholly in abeyance while the
process of recovery takes place. There is something in all our artificial
efforts which is absolutely right, and cannot be withdrawn : namely, the
task itself of being self-governing, world-building, self-making beings. It
is our nature to be artificial, and our right to be wolf-knowing : whatever
postulates and selfhoods have to be negated and TO vised, they are not
these. Freedom has the peculiarity that it can recognize its own relative
failure, and define more or less clearly what it lacks ; and in so far as it
can define its need, it can consciously pursue it. Thus the preparation
of the mystic never surrenders its intentionality, even when it is most
passive.

2 To Kant's mind, it is the communicability of the aesthetic judg-
ment, the universal validity to which it aspires, that stamps it at once
as an affair in which thought is engaged. But he cannot identify it with
objective reason, nor with explicit reason ; hence he explains it as a sub-

THE PRINCIPLE OF ALTERNATION 421

worship the idea has broken through and become explic-
itly an object of search; the soul deliberately seeks
the One, the individuality of the world, as a present
object of experience.

Everything that may still be to us an object of
immediate and effortless appreciation will take part in
this search. Hence worship naturally allies itself out-
wardly, as well as inwardly, with recreation, social enjoy-
ment, and beauty. Worship uses these, and goes
beyond them : it recognizes in them the absolute which
is its own and discards the rest ; puts behind its back
all but the One which is in all, and is the condition of
them all. This final, sacrificial aspect of worship —
the negation, or rather subordination, of all partial
loves — is the act which alone can make these loves
immortal : it is the conscious possessing of their neces-
sary condition.

Thus worship adds the touch of unity and self-con-

jective play of the faculties of knowledge in an " Erkenntnis iiberhaupt."
" Also imiHS der Gemtitszustand der oines Gofiihls des freien Spiels der
Vorstellungskrtlfte za einem Erkenntnisse uberhaupt sein." And of what
Vorstellungskriifto ? " Kinbildungskraft, fur die Zusammensetzung des
Mannichfaltigen der Anschauung, und Verstand fur die Einheit des Be-
griffs, der die Vorstellungen veremigt." Kritik der Urteilskraft, p. 62.
We know, iu general, well enough, what this means : the sense of the
inner onlivenment, and lightening at the same time, of the action of our
" powers " in the presence of beauty, as if a smooth place had been found
and those powers were not more in harmony with each other than with
the reality which they appreciate. It is essentially free play, and reflec-
tive, but not subjective.

Kant notes the relatively effortless, self-continuing character of the
experience of beauty thus : "Sie hat (eine) Causalitat, den Zustand der
Vorstellungeu selbst uud die BeschJiftigung der Erkenntnisskrafte ohne
weitere Absent zu erhalten. Wh weilen bei die Betrachtung des
SchUnen, weil diese Betrachtung sich selbst st&rkt und reproducirt."
Ibid., p. 68.

422 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

sciousness to the whole body of our natural spiritual
recovery. It is, I repeat, nothing more than doing with
the whole self, and consciously, that which in blinder
and more fragmentary fashion we are doing at every
moment of our waking lives, and especially in the
moments of partial return, such as we have mentioned.
The mystic is he who knows that his insight must be an
event in time, and that it is his right as a self-conscious
being in time to seek for it. The man who prefers to
leave his religion in the obscure, in its diffused and
partial forms, is the man who puts the prize of life upon
vagueness and the unexplicit. The mystic, on the
other hand, who adds worship to all the rest, the mystic
is the man who prizes the overt, the definite, and the

literal in religion.

v

The motive of the mystic, then, is something quite
different from moral ambition. In the active part of
the mystic's preparation for worship, the moral motive
may still be visible : it may still be touched by a sense
of the importance of work, of various humane interests,
as if it were for the sake of these ends that one now
turns his back upon them. The zeal of the mystic for
self-purification, his moral scrupulousness, may be in
part derived from his view of his own practical duty or
his desire for success. But this is all something dis-
tinct from the love of God in its psychological meaning;
and this meaning does not appear until the active stage
of worship, which is " prayer," gives way to passivity in
the discovery of an object of effortless appreciation.
Unless the characteristic of pleasure, that is, of wholly
spontaneous and original conviction of worth, enters

THE PRINCIPLE OF ALTERNATION 423

into worship, the prayer has no answer and worship is
to that extent a failure.

But in the mystic experience that is what happens.
The object upon which the worshipper has bent his
thought becomes actually significant of the whole. The
mystic has found a present object which is able to
gather into its own vortex all the meanings of his
worldly work, and therewith to abolish the independent
worth of that work. His idea of the world in its unity
has, simply, become adequate to its synthetic task ; and
the disunited segments find their way together : this is
the whole secret of value. It would be just to say that
the worshipper is at first moved rather by the desire to
love God, than by that love as a ruling motive : and
that the actual love of God is itself the success of
prayer, simultaneous with the insight which the mystic
obtains, identical with it.1 The character of this expe-
rience is well pictured in a simple note in the diary of
Tolstoy, whose mystical traits (though he would hardly
be called a mystic) are closely allied with his powers of
penetrating self-description :

" Yesterday," he writes, " I hardly slept all night. Having
posted up my diary, I prayed to God. It is impossible to
convey the sweetness of the feeling I experienced during my
prayer* I said the prayers I usually repeat by heart, fi Our
Father/ * To the Virgin,' etc., and still remained in prayer.
If one defines prayer as a petition or as a thanksgiving, then
I did not pray. I desired something supremely good ; but

1 "L'oraison s'appelle meditation jusqu'a ce qu'elle ait produit le
noiel de la devotion: apres cela elle se convertit en contemplation. Le
de*sir d'obtenir 1'amour divin nous fait mtfditer; mais 1'amour obteim nous
fait contempler." St. Francois de Sales, Traitd de 1'amour de Dieu, VI,
iii, quoted by De Montmorand, Bevue philosophise, vol. 57, p. 252.

424 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

what, I cannot express, though I was clearly conscious of what
I wanted. I wished to merge into the Universal Being. I
asked him to pardon my crimes ; yet, no, I did not ask for
that, for I felt that if he had given me this blissful moment,
he had pardoned me. I asked, and at the same time felt that
I had nothing to ask ; and that I cannot and do not know how
to ask : I thanked him, but not with words or thought. I com-
bined in one feeling both petition and gratitude. Fear quite
vanished. I could not have separated any one emotion, —
faith, hope, or love, — from the general feeling. No, this was
what I experienced yesterday : it was love of God, lofty love,
uniting in itself all that is good, excluding all that is bad." l

The moving principle of Tolstoy's life at this time
was doubtless a large human ambition, taking impulsive
shape as a desire to perfect himself, and to "test him-
self"; and swinging perhaps only in this solitary in-
stance within the circle of mystic worship. But this
human ambition and this divine love are closely related
to each other. We may say that beyond the limits of
the mystic experience itself, the love of God takes on
the form of human ambition ; that these motives are, so
to speak, allotropic forms of the same. They alternate
with each other, as the hour glass is turned, — each
one in turn becoming the life of the other. With the
idea of God, one loves the world ; and then with the
idea of the world, one loves God again, — and the two
loves, or ambitions, are of one substance, though they
involve alternations in the history of the empirical will.

VI

For worship cannot last ; it also has its type of self-
defeat and death. The worshipper who persists in his

* Life of Tolstoy, Aylmer Maude, voL r, pp. 63-64.

THE PRINCIPLE OF ALTERNATION 425

contemplation of the whole, thinking to establish himself
permanently in the immediate presence of God, becomes
an automaton, precisely as the determined worker
becomes a machine.

' Automatism ' of a very literal character is not only
admitted but even boasted of by certain mystics who
have professed to enjoy the constant vision of God.
Madame Guyon reaches a stage of perfection whose
chief marks are the absence of personal volition, the
replacement of effortful voluntary action by spontaneous
obedience to the suggestions of her religious sense, or
fancy. She accepts the logic of the complete with-
drawal of individual will and choice, namely, that all
acts become indifferent: there is a will in the world and
she has become the instrument of it, but with perfect
passivity, without sharing in it, " laissant & Dieu le soin
de faire naitre les occasions et de les ex&3uter." " But
why do you do this rather than that? I do not know*
I give myself over to that which carries me on/'1 From
this condition of mind there comes the " apostolic life,"
marked by an extraordinary facility in preaching and
writing, capacity to do a prodigious amount of work,
and to undergo great distress without protest from her
own intelligence and will. Her life during this time
has traits of largeness ; but it is a largeness which is
evidently consuming itself and lessens to a small end :
it exhibits much free motion, but little effect ; it produces
much writing, elaborate commentaries on scripture,
" Torrents " of various sorts ; but how much of perma-
nent worth ? 2 To abandon conscious control of the

i Cf . Delacroix, Etudes, etc., p. 155 ff.

* Mme. Guyon's (Euvres completes fill forty volumes. In it all, there

426 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

trend of work, to resign remembrance of what has been
done and written, to live continually in the present
moment only (in so far as these things actually occur)
— here inspiration, real enough in itself, begins to
decline into irresponsibility. The sad weakness of will
and of voluntary thought which comes of it is sufficient
comment on its general failure as a plan of life. " I
find in myself no power either to decide or to execute;
I appear to myself like a phantom." l We have no need
to dwell on the failure of unremitting worship. Wo
in our day have well perceived and overcome that dan-
ger. We need only note the fact.

Thus each aspect of life apart from its alternate
becomes a mechanism. And the whole of human
existence falls into two phases, work and worship ; the
domain of duty and the domain of love, respectively.

We have now outlined the relation which worship, as
I believe, does normally bear to life at large: it is a
necessary alternative to all our effortful willing and
knowing, so far as these are living processes of empir-
ical history. The principle of alternation tends to justify

is some genuine inspiration. Cowper (in a letter to Unwiw, Aug. 3,
1782) says, " Mr. Bull . . has put into nay hands three volumes of French
poetry, composed by Madame Guion — a quietist, say you, and a fanatic,
I will have nothing to do with her — *T is very well, . . but in the mean
time her verse is the only French verse I ever read that 1 found agreeable ;
there is a neatness in it equal to that which we applaud, with so much
reason, in the compositions of Prior. I have translated several of them,
and shall proceed in my translations," etc. The preface to " Podsies et
cantiques spirituels " describes (doubtless with exaggeration) this verse
as having been written "sans aucune reflexion. . , Co hri 4tait un gSne
insupportable de faire la moindre reflexion," See Delacroix, p. 158*

1 " Je ne trouve en moi nulle puissance de vouloir ni d' exe*cuter, et je me
trouve comme un f ant6me." Lettres V, p. 458 ; Delacroix, Etudes, p. 214.

THE PRINCIPLE OF ALTERNATION 427

the f negative path' of the mystic by placing it in its
organic context. Neither phase of the rhythm is jus-
tified by itself. Duty has no right over men apart from
their religious experience. On the other hand, religion
has no right apart from its descent into the world of
effort. In reality, in the logical and eternal order of
things, these two phases of experience belong together,
and in time also are always finding their way together:
but in psychological order, in the natural history of the
mind, they fall apart, and must be pursued separately.
Eeligion belongs with morals — yet the deeds of religion
must alternate with the moral life and for a time displace
it. Eeligion belongs with all the works of art and
science and human betterment — yet it has its own
moment which takes away from theirs.

Any given moment of life must choose between two
goods, psychologically incompatible. On the one hand,
the peace of the hermit, the silence of the forest, the
exaltation of sacrifice, the mightiness of simplification
and unity, the joy of self-abandonment, the calm of
absolute contemplation, the vision of God. On the
other hand, the variety and stress of life, the zest of
common ends, the mastery of means, the glory of infinite
enterprise, the pride of creativity and self-possession.
The modern world as a whole has made its choice. But
there is a better choice : namely, the choice of both.
For the life o£ each is that it may lose itself, from time
to time, in the life of the other. And this, which is
obvious in things partial, is true — and even chiefly
true — in things total.

CHAPTER XXIX

PRAYER AND ITS ANSWER

IN what has gone before, we have been so much en-
gaged with the psychological bearings and analogies
of worship, that the central purpose of the mystic's
prayer and its answer have been obscured. It may be
well, therefore, to state now in simpler fashion our view
of prayer, and of the attainment which prayer reaches ;
not attempting to carry theory farther, but simply to
relieve and clarify this central point.

Let us first consider what is meant by the answer to
prayer, that is, the mystic experience itself, and then
the nature of the prayer which finds such answer.

Mystic insight has been compared by William James
with our occasional experiences of realizing, more or
less suddenly, the meaning of words, sayings, points of
view, which may have been familiar and empty posses-
sions for a long time. Such realizing as this, we may
observe, is never simply the discovery of the meaning
of a general proposition. It is a flowing together, after
some artificial separation, of universal and particular.
I wake up to the meaning of an old adage, or of an
opinion to which I have been hostile on prejudice, when
I bring such a generality into connection with a con-
crete occasion. And the commoner mystical experiences
begin, I believe, with the concrete occasion, only sug-

PRATER AND ITS ANSWER 429

gesting or foreshadowing the universal meanings which
they have.

Experiences of this sort are not uncommon. They
are but moments of greater mental integrity than usual,
in which consciousness is more concrete, the associations
and resources of the mind more instantly collected and
fused into a total grasp of the meaning of its present
object. Such a moment is apt to be disconnected from
other moments just on account of its unusual synthesis:
it is disconnected from our usual condition of discon-
nectedness. What surprises us in such a moment is
that we are commonly so blind. Hence these moments
are remembered, and become authoritative over other
moments, as occasions when we have seen clearly, whether
or not we can any longer recover that same clearness
of view.1

Such an experience for instance, sporadic yet fairly
common, is a sudden realization of the flux of time, the
aaystery of the past that is gone as if it had never been,
and of the future moment that is sure to be, yet is wholly
non-existent. So seductive is the occupation of the mind
with generalities, and so practically useful the assump-
tion that everything recurs, that the individual quality
of time-units rarely penetrates to us — we act as if one
moment could always be substituted for another. The

1 Such experiences reach all degrees of clearness. The dominant
idea which defines a passing 'mood* — and most certainly every mood
has its idea, or vision — may be very obscure. Our various feelings, our
marked experiences of pleasure and pain — though they never fail to
become authoritative in our total consciousness of what the world means
— are, singly taken, hard to read: we seldom think of them as moments
of insight. We hardly recognize an experience as typically mystical until
the idea has broken through, and our sense of its significance outweighs our
interest in its present quality.

430 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

uniqueness of the present moment has to be discovered
and rediscovered ; it cannot be fairly seen without some-
thing like a religious reverberation; the poetry of many
an Omar is in that simple fact. It is perhaps some such
sense of infinite significance in mere present existence
which leads Meister Eckhart to say that " He who stands
continually in a present Now, in him God the Father
begets his Son without ceasing." *

Still more frequent and still more typically mystical
is the discovery of oneself as an individual ; as when
some summons drives home the question. Who are you?
What are you ? The assumption of an artificial selfhood,
if we are right, is not an accident nor a pure vice — it
is a necessary incident of duty. The idealist as well as
the hypocrite may be suddenly confronted with a new
vision of himself upon a rude demand to be " natural/'
or serious, or sincere. Such demands very frequently
find only another self — not the real one ; may substi-
tute for the social self a more primitive and uncouth
being, equally untrue, the self of my bad conscience or
of my self -distrust — still, then, a theoretical self, though
less theoretical than the made-self. The individual self
is indeed hard to find, the self which is, deeper than all
epithets. To come upon this individual is an event
straightway known to be significant2 Inge quotes the
following from Tennyson's memoirs :

1 "Meister eghart sprioht: wer alle cit allein ist, der ist gottes wir-
dige; vnt wer alliu cifc do beimenen ist, dem ist got gagenwurtig; vnt wer
alliucit stat in einem gegenwurtigen nu, in dem gebirt got der uatter sinen
sune an vnderlas." Wackernagel, Altdoutsches Lesebnch, col. 670.

2 What this revelation of self may signify is a further question and
doubtless differs at different times. It is likely to be an egoistic revelation)
a vision of the infinite risk of being alive, and of the infinite right of the

PRAYER AND ITS ANSWER 431

"A kind of waking trance I have often had, quite from boy-
hood, when I have been all alone. This has generally come
upon me through repeating my own name two or three times to
myself silently, till all at once, out of the intensity of the con-
sciousness of individuality, the individual itself seemed to dis-
solve and fade away into boundless being : and this is not a
confused state, but the clearest of the clearest " etc.

But the best known of all experiences o£ the mystic
type is that of discovering the individuality of another
person.

We deal with men for the most part through their
qualities and properties, that is to say, through their
universal, describable, recominendable or eondernnable
sides ; each man stands to us, or tends to stand, for a
certain formula, quality, function, in semi-official man-
ner. We have our theory o£ him; he plays his part in
our artificial world, as one of many. We note in him
many qualities, good and bad, interesting and perhaps
contradictory; we wonder how all these characters are
united in one being who feels no such variety in him-
self. The one quality that combines these many in a
consistent identity we can neither describe nor convey;
nor can we surely hold the memory of it except by
return from time to time to his presence. But for

solitary self to be satisfied. It always includes in itself that more abstract
vision above described, the uniqueness of the time-movement. Subjective
idealism, and such practical philosophy as that of Nietzsche or Max Stir-
ner, are unravelings of the purport of just such mystical experiences : and
they are not false visions, for the stake of existence to the subject cannot
be overstated, though it may well be disproportionately stated. The will
to power and the will to save one's soul have much in common: and one
as the other has immeasurable religious importance. In all such experi-
ences, and the self-recovery that goes with them, it is the vision of the
individual which marks the moment of mystic illumination*

432 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

the most part we are not concerned with this; the man
is a function, and would be improved by the excision of
his bad qualities; we could easily re-make him to his
advantage, after the pattern of our own universal
standards. Our critical judgment of him is, we have
said, pluralistic and general : there is a miracle in him
— that is, his individuality — but we remain outside the
mystery, and willingly. For it is the business of men
to fit well together in the work of the world, to be
officers there, reliable working-universals.

But at times we are granted something like a mystic
vision : it seems to us that we have come into the pres-
ence of the individual and have seen the miracle as such.
We have found the other soul in its seclusion and sim-
plicity— so we think; and we begin to appreciate the
place even of its apparent defects in that synthesis which
is itself. The critical attitude is no longer able to hold
its negation against this interest in the person as sub-
stance— as something that is, and is one. The vision
in fact begins to work upon us; we cannot forget it:
we no longer attend to it with voluntary effort, but it
forms a part of our consciousness and begins to make
us over after its own pattern, as if it were active and
we were plastic before it. This perception of the other
as an individual being is love, in its special meaning.
Love does not displace criticism : it contains it.1 Love
accepts the individual with his defects, because the One

1 1 perceive faults in my social acquaintances, but I do not make a
practice of telling them their faults, because my relations with them are
still subject to the abstract assumptions of our artificial selfhoods. But
whatever fault I discover in one whom I love I make known to him : for
thereby I address the self which I have discovered, simpler and greater
than the self of that fault, and which can join me in being hostile to it.

PRAYER AND ITS ANSWER 433

which it has seen contains the inward remedy for those
defects. Nor does love feel the need of concealing its
own faults, for love of another involves also a discov-
ery of the individual in oneself : l it is a presence of the
individual to the individual, a "flight of the alone to
the alone."

Love is a revelation like that of the mystic, full of
significance. For in finding the individual, one has
indeed found the individual's idea. That which explains
and unites and largely justifies all these various and
seeming-inconsistent qualities is some view of the world
which he has, some hold on the absolute, some whole-
idea. He is an individual vision of reality; and in
knowing him, I do at the same time know his vision
and make his vision my own. This is the central fact
of all mysticism: namely, that the discovery of the indi-
vidual is always a discovery of truth, of a powerfully
synthetic idea, and yet not by the way of effortful
thinking. That interest in another soul which we call
love is not an interest in his idea as a matter of theory :
it is an interest in him as an individual substance, a
being which knows and is more than its knowledge.

All these common experiences, we say. are analogous
to the mystic insight. And there can now be little
doubt about the nature of that insight itself and its
place among the rest. For what is the mystic experi-
ence but finding the idea of the whole, as love finds
the idea of a person? Worship seeks the self of the
world as an individual being; but in finding this self, it

1 Love thus includes in itself all of those lesser or relatively abstract
experiences which we have been describing.

434: WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

gains, or regains, a tolerating conception of this world,
a view which can make life as a whole once more accept-
able, inviting, great. In this idea it is able not to sink
but to suspend its criticisms of existence : it is not recon-
ciled to defects, but it sees something more than dead
fact, even some meaning, in their presence. The total
sound of life sends up to it some echo of beauty ; and it
is able, without blindness, to become as it were a lover
of the whole. For the idea which thus of itself absorbs
our hostilities, binding our many and divergent judg-
ments in powerful synthesis, is won not by the effort
of the theoretic will, but by coming effortlessly upon
the spirit of the world, as an individual being, simple,
wonderful, and in close union with the individual in
oneself.

These other experiences are not only analogous to the
mystic insight : they are, as we have said, parts of it.
All loss of value in the world is at the same time a loss
of religious insight. All the artificialities of effortful
attention strike first at the virility of the whole-idea,
and dim the consciousness of God. All absolute criti-
cism condemns the whole; all pluralism mutilates first
the unity of existence; all romanticism adds to the bur-
den of heaven. And wherever in all life the individual
vanishes from my grasp, there has vanished first the
individual God. Where men and self become abstrac-
tions, there God also becomes an abstract universal,
occupying an official position in my artificial world,
reduced to be dealt with in polite and deadly distance.
On the other hand, wherever the individual is recovered,
there is in some degree also a vision of God. God is
the One of all these plural loves and pleasures ; and it

PRAYER AND ITS ANSWER 436

is the love of God which naturally includes and places
all the rest.

But of all these objects, God is the only one always
accessible to direct pursuit ; the only one admitting such
a conscious, voluntary cult as worship is. Our pleasures
are so many discoveries; friendships, appreciations,
loves generally, happen to men as by good chance : once
they have dawned upon us, we may pursue them as
vigorously as we will, but the appreciations themselves
cannot be directly sought. It is only such vision of
God as one at any time has that enables him to recog-
nize the pleasant, the beautiful, in things and persons :
the only net that can be spread for the loving of men
and things is the consciousness of the absolute.1 So
far as these other objects retain their value, that is to
say, their idea, we may turn to them ; but their salt has
a tendency to lose its savor, and cannot be salted again
by its own kind. This is the root of our trouble. We
know always that life is worth living; we know, too,
that we have in us somewhere the power of appreciat-
ing it; we know that nothing is common or unclean,
and nothing hopeless: only — we cannot see it so. We
have lost our primitive joy in primitive things ; we have
lost our freshness of impression. It is no longer true
that "the scent of a flower, the flight of sea-gulls
round a cliff, the cornfield in the sun, stir us to strange
and cosmic delights." And it is worse than useless, so
we find, to try with might and main to feel in these

1 As a command, the injunction to love one's neighbor would be
meaningless unless the command to love God went before it. In the
case of all other affections, I love what I must ; in the case of this one I
love as I will, hence it is subject to command.

436 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

things what we have once felt. Nothing is more com-
mon than this trying, and nothing more fatal. Yet the
thing is there. There are great funds of enthusiasm
and literal love of men and things in us, if we could
but reach them. There is a love of life in us which we
never let go. But that love of life, if we can discern
its true nature, is at bottom a love of God : it is that
mystic thread which " in the ground of the soul " is
never broken. If we can regain that, all the rest will
follow. And only by regaining that can we surely
recover the rest. It is for this reason that we must add
to all the other means for keeping or recovering our
spiritual integrity, prayer. And what, in this present
day of grace, does prayer mean ?

It means, in the first place, that we maintain our dis-
content, returning again and again to the demand that
our existence shall find itself justified in our own eyes.
The first practical principle of religion is to hold with-
out weakening the right of every individual life to know
its own worth. We must not let reality go, this reality
which has produced us, until it satisfies us: it must
yield us the idea which unites what we most deeply
desire with what is. This is the prayer of Jacob ; and
in a fundamental sense it is the first prayer of every
human being. We are right in wishing to see first and
be loyal afterward.

It means, in the second place, that we understand
clearly to what self this right belongs, and cultivate
that self. This right to see does not belong to our com-
plex and strident personality which goes about, think-
ing by omnipotent effort to earn its happiness and its

PRAYER AND ITS ANSWER 437

certainty. It belongs only to that in us which is simple
and sincere. The sincere is that which is moved by
necessity not by effort (no feeling is sincere which is
made by will) : the genuine will is the will which goes
forth from effortless attention, that is to say, from love
— and that is to say, from sight. We have the right
to see first and be loyal afterward only because unless
we see we cannot be loyal, nor in any sense sincere
or moral. No determination to be a lover of life, no
resolve to fight down desire or grief or regret or aver-
sion, no attempt to transform one's own nature, can suc-
ceed by dint of the effortful will alone. But sight does
its own transforming : sight turns the energy of our
own desires into the work of their own re-mating. It
is thus an effortless self, and therewith a necessary willr
that we have to seek. And for the same reason, it
is a simple self, not involved in our artificial distinc-
tions.1

To be able to command this simple and sincere self
is the critical condition of religious insight. Hence
(thirdly) we in this day must still follow, in some fash-
ion significant for ourselves, the negative path of all
&he mystics. We require the sight which cannot come
through trying to see ; we must try, then, to put our-
selves consciously where sight must follow. We must

1 This world is so made, not only that a simple view of the whole is
possible, but thnt our mastery of the world may proceed, and must pro-
ceed, from this simple view outward. The idealist philosopher has been
inclined to conceive the subject as ruler of the object : in this case, to
* return into oneself ' is to return to the seat of ultimate power, and to find
the law-giving principle of things, that which is a priori in both thought
and practice. But it is rather the simple than the subjective that we
must learn to appeal to, the simple which is both subjective and objec-
tive, and whose a priori, or ' anticipated attainment ' is concrete.

438 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

deliberately review and reject, from time to time, what-
ever is falsely artificial and self-assertive in our out-
going purposes; we must track, as far as we can, the
points of our own partiality. We must, even in this
modern world of ours, know how to shake off the pre-
possessions of our theoretic wills ; to regard all ambi-
tions and duties for the time as non-existent; to reduce
all reality to the primitive terms of self, universe, and
the present moment (wherein everything begins from the
beginning). In this stark, original selfhood, detached
from action and from the warping of the interests of
action, we view all that active career as in a drama, as
the life of another, in the light of what we can then
and there muster of the whole. Its loves and hates rise
up before us in a more universal frame. We must
recall especially whatever is still to us of effortless
value, whatever we do still sincerely enjoy and love, and
we must pray for the vision of the whole of which these
various goods are fragments, and upon which they depend
as their absolute. I use the word 'pray/ because, in
the end, there is no other word which conveys that atti-
tude of will in which effort is so combined with non-
effort, and self-assertion with consciousness of absolute
dependence. Nor do I know why this word should be
translated into anything more scholastic. The insight
we require is both a right and a gift, the justest gift
in all experience ; we dare not be too proud to comply
with its evident conditions. We must know that in
doing these things, we are already using a degree of
mystic insight : we are relying upon an attachment to
the whole which is too deep in us to be lost or over-
eome ; we are striving to ' enter into ourselves/ to

PRAYER AND ITS ANSWER 439

recognize this attachment for what it is, the love of
the God of that alienated world. This is prayer.

And the answer to prayer is whatever of simplicity,
of naturalness, of original appreciation, is brought into
our view of things by this act of obedience of the mind
to its absolute object. In proportion as our prayer is
honest, we shall find ourselves less thinking, and more
seeing ; and we can turn again to meet experience with
so much better poise and understanding. How full,
how instantaneous, how overwhelming may be the
vision of the deity of the world and the worth of one's
own part in it, no one can say : certainly it is beyond
the province of philosophy to prescribe. Neither can it
be told when or through what apparent accidents the
deeper insights of our experience may occur. Philos-
ophy can only point out the fundamental law of reli-
gious life, the right to see first and be loyal afterward ;
and interpret in its own abstract language the condi-
tions of that vision.

But the meaning of the mystic experience is pro-
phetic. It anticipates an attainment still to be won ; it
can be held only by proceeding to that winning. Wor-
ship is false unless it is sanctioned in turn by the life
that follows it. This sanction is twofold. First that it
does not undermine, but rather supports, the world of
other aims. The mystic must return not less a lover of
men, but rather a lover in more intense and human
fashion, because it is only the true worshipper who can
find the world genuinely lovable. The vision of God
must give the reason for all the irrational attachments
of life, all the sacrifices of self to brother, state, or

440 WORSHIP AND THE MYSTICS

cause. It furnishes the answer to the last Why of
duty. To be * loyal afterward ' is the first sanction of
true worship : and also the condition of further insight.
It is by the alternation of loyalty and worship that
each life must hold and increase its individual level
of value.

The second sanction of worship is, that the worship-
per does not merely sustain, but creates. All beauty,
as Plato thought, incites to reproduction. It incites
perhaps to something more than reproduction — to
origination. Some superabundance there is in the
vision of God which sends the seer back not to the
old but to the new ; not with a release from old griev-
ances, but with something like a hunger for pain and
difficulty. The edge of the tool of will is restored,
and it is eager for world-making. The man is able to
fight, to oppose and suffer ; he is endowed with grit,
with faith. This is the moral result of true worship.

And this, I believe, is the whole inward response to
prayer. The mystic has reverted to the One, and now
returns to the many, more real than before, more po-
tent. That which can happen only with the conscious-
ness of God is an act of God: and I cannot doubt that
it has been with the mystic even as he says — namely,
that God has given to him something of Himself. By
just so much as the ultimate meaning of tilings becomes
present to him, by just so much is he capable of bring-
ing new values back to earth ; not in explicit form at
first, but as an enhanced quantity of being in himself,
as a renewed grasp of the quality of the goal. In this
way is the mystic freighted with the future ; and the
fruit he may gather in his own person, or may spread

PRAYER AND ITS ANSWER 441

abroad in the world merely in the form of his own
quickened hold on life and love of it, in the form of
the " Holy Spirit," to be applied and gathered by others.
But the whole meaning of the answer to prayer, and
so of prayer itself, cannot appear until we have reviewed
those fruits of which the mystic experience contains
the prophecy.

PART VI
THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

PAKT VI

PRELIMINARY

IN times gone by, the more remarkable experiences of
the mystics were unhesitatingly read as direct com-
munications of God to the human mind. The content
of some of these experiences has been deposited (to-
gether with much else) in the various sacred writings
of the world, as revelation. Other such experiences
seemed to signify commands, and found expression
chiefly in action : their record is to be found in history,
as the inspired works and prophetic deeds of men. In
religion as we know it to-day, we hear little of either
revelation or prophecy : answer to prayer, such as it is,
seems to have taken on a more private interest. Yet I
have no doubt that in some form or other these are
still the fruits of religion : so far as religious experience
has become intelligible to us, it has been as a develop-
ment both in idea and in will. And further, I have no
doubt that these results are acts of God : for that is an
act of God which cannot happen without turning the
mind to God. I shall therefore discuss the fruits of
religion under these heads : revelation, inspiration (re-
ligious creativity), and the prophetic consciousness.

These are the results of religion as they appear first
in the life of the individual, and through the individual
contribute to the wealth of mankind. It is through the
individual that religion achieves those results in history

446 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

which first drew our attention (chapter ii), and whose
theory we are now ready to develop. But there are
further fruits of religion, more distinctively historical
in character; results which appear in the structure of
the social environment wherein the religious conscious-
ness must live and breathe. It remains for the con-
cluding chapter to outline these over-individual fruits
of religion,, and their effects in the general movement
of history. Thus we touch upon the edge of another
aspect of the woi& of God in the world, suggested in
part by the term providence, and in part by the term
salvation in so far as this saving must come to the in-
dividual from the outside, through the medium of his
spiritual environment. Here we shall find a necessary
supplement to the inner answer to prayer ; and also a
view of the function of those historic mediators which
the universal spirit of religion forever inclines to trans-
cend, and forever returns to by an inward necessity
hard to understand.

CHAPTER XXX

PECULIAR KNOWLEDGE AND CERTAINTY:
REVELATION AND DOGMA

IN speaking of revelation we have in mind that
knowledge which is the especial product or by-product
of religion ; we have to ask what it is that the mystic
knows, which cannot otherwise be known. We have
in mind also those sacred books. They form a peculiar
body of literature : unorganized, obscure, repetitious,
unscientific, powerful, immortal. In this present chapter
we shall have in view both this ancient literature and
contemporary religious experience; and shall undertake
to interpret the one by the other.

The mystic both in his preparation and in the expe-
rience that supplements that preparation, is a world-
destroyer as we have seen : and his return must be a
re-creation of a world. The mystic is always original
in the sense that he feels obliged to make his world
consciously his own, to build up everything for him-
self from the beginning. But this may not mean that
he has any novelty to offer others ; on the contrary,
being much occupied with first principles of world-build-
ing he may never come so far as the world otherwise
has come. Tolstoy well shows this quality o£ the mys-
tic as knower : the imperious necessity of rejecting all
previous accomplishment of men ; of reducing the world

448 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

to anarchy, and building all up again from chaos. His
life is spent among the rudiments, not without great
result, but without ever perceiving the worth of his own
temporal present : a huge, fertile, world-moving anach-
ronism. Such in general is the case of genius, control-
ling the future not by any complete grasp of its own
age, but by a recovered hold upon the ancient and eter-
nal. And such, in general, is also the case of the mystic ;
whose chief concern is not to find things new to men at
large, but only to find the Ancient of Days as a God
revealed personally to him. The mystic is, in the first
place, an original knower of old truth.

What the mystic knows is, first of all, that which he
intends to know, namely God : and in so far as he is a
mystic pure and simple he knows nothing else than
God. There is nothing new about this knowledge
except its relation to him: what he knows he knows
certainly, in his own person, and for himself.

Nevertheless, he seems to regard his old truth as of
general interest : he treats it as if it were a veritable
mystery, and as something which could not otherwise
be known to men than through his announcing it. He
is not in any way abashed by the multitude of his pred-
ecessors who have been publishing the same thing.
The typical mystic seems to be innocent of all historical
comparison in this respect : history always begins with
him, and flows outward in all directions. He speaks
his mind as if he were the first to speak, and as if all
depended upon his speaking.1 It is because of this

1 There is, of course, a psychological necessity here at work. No man
can keep a truth as his own without trying to impose it upon others. If
it is a troth, this revelation, it is a knowledge of mankind's god, not of

CERTAINTY AND DOGMA 449

circumstance that the systematic truth-seeker, who
measures revelatiou by stages, finds the literature of
mysticism and of all religion curiously repetitious and

any private god of the worshipper ; and it must show itself true in their
confirmation of it. A certainty which cannot be recovered iu the certainty
of other moments and of other men is a defeated and dying certainty.
For his own sake, if for no other, the mystic has been driven to become a
propagandist of his old discoveries.

This necessity of corroboration casts doubt upon the absolute cer-
tainty of the revelation itself. The mystic experience seems to carry
with it a great surge of certainty : the mystic knows that " This is God ";
there is a sense of arrival, of having touched goal, that seems to banish
all possibility of doubt. This moment becomes the standard of all cer-
tainty ; it is an " illumination." Yet, the mystic himself frequently falls
into doubt, in later moments, about the authenticity of his experience ;
it may have been due to the devil, or to imagination. If he thus belies
his own original assertion of immediate certainty, what credit can it have
on strictly non-partisan grounds ?

The mystic needs to judge the truth of his experience by its bearing
on other experience. If it accords with life generally, he will in the long
run regard it true ; if it cannot be made to harmonize with experience
otherwise and with thought, he must abandon it. Hence there can be no
immediate certainty, we are sometimes told ; assurance is conferred on the
mystical experience by its external relations, by the entire system of liv-
ing truth into which it falls. The truth of the world is necessary to give
certainty to the truth of God. " It is the possibility of comprehending
these experiences," says Delacroix, " of living them, of utilizing them in
action, which here serves as a touchstone of their truth. Intuition is of
no value save in an ensemble with which it accords." Etudes de psycho-
logie, etc., p. 380.

I agree with Delacroix that without a system of experience there
would be no certainty of anything ; and that harmony with world-knowl-
edge is needed to establish the certainty of God. But since we have
judged that the certainty of this world is derived from the certainty of
God in the first place, the world can hardly withhold its consent. The
world is not otherwise known than as the world of this God ; God is not
otherwise known than as the God of this world : the two knowledges are
of one piece — the mystic cannot be mistaken. The intention of worship,
which gives the whole experience its identity, has its continuous object,
the known God present in all experience : this is the absolute constant in
the process, and hence not subject to doubt. Thus it is possible to be

460 THE FRUITS OF KELIGJLON

empty, defying serial arrangement, recurring again and
again to the same point. But there are reasons for
this peculiarity and we shall do well to look into them :
emptiness and antiquity have their own way of becom-
ing fertile.

In the first place his repetitions are justified by the
character of the truth which he has to announce. For
his truth is a truth which has to be verified individually
by every new human being. The ancient truth of the
mystic is nothing else than the truth about originality,
about what it is to own one's own soul. The knowl-
edge of God as the worshipper has it is the opposite
of everything that can ever become merely traditional
in religion. No matter how true an idea of God reli-
gion may hand on, the true idea may constitute a wall
which keeps God out, if it is adopted as an idea simply,.
— that is to say, as a repetition of other men's insights,

certain at the moment, without waiting for later oorroboration or later
doubt. I know of no certainty which is not certainty at some moment
or series of moments ; certainty also must have its temporal existence*
We must remember that in these experiences, to which we giro the name
of mystic simply because in them the individual finds himself consciously
at one with the whole of things, the world is not absent : it is with one's
world-knowledge that one now knows his world-unity, or God. The
system of ideas is in no sense abandoned, but rather in the liveliest use,
though not thought of. Hence it is that the mystic may be certain in
his moment, immediately.

But to keep this certainty in all later moments is a problem for those
later moments. Systematic agreement and alternation are necessary to
hold what has in a moment been gained. The moaning of that experi-
ence is the meaning which it can keep throughout all such oscillations of
thought ; it is the invariant which survives and becomes defined through
the long course of trial and error which all this system-making and com-*
parison involves. Both statements are true — one may be wholly certain
of the presence of God ; and yet one must keep this certainty, novel or
not, by communicating it.

CERTAINTY AND DOGMA 451

as a universal idea. God, who is truly said to explain
man to himself, must explain me to myself. What I
require to find in a god is that " This is what I have
wanted ; this is what I have been meaning all the time ;
the world as I now see it is a world in which I as a
primitive, various, infinitely discontented will can com-
pletely live and breathe." This is what the mystic is
trying to make plain — that the idea, as a universal,
is not sufficient for any man to live by.

Hence the chief burden of his revelation (as if of
the idea's own never-resting conscience) is that religion
must exist as experience and not as idea only. There
is nothing in sensation which physical science cannot
exhaust, except the experience of having sensations : in
the same way, there is nothing in the mystic experience
not expressible in idea, except the experiencing itself.
This is the chief part of the mystic knowledge which
tsannot be otherwise known, namely that the mystic
experience is possible. Monotonously and age after
age, men rediscover and reannounce this invariant truth,
as if they were calling on men to exist, to live, to save
their souls. And what is it to save one's soul, if not to
be original in this sense (and in what follows from it) ?
From this point of view the reiteration of the mystic is
justified.

But there ib a further reason for the mystic's persist-
ent celebration of time-worn axioms. Repetition, which
is abomination to science, is not necessarily an abomi-
nation to the sense of beauty, nor to the sense of grati-
tude, certainly not to the lover, and for similar reason
not to the worshipper. Individual interest can never

4S2 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

recur often enough to its old theme ; and ' revelation/
though it is a contribution to truth, is not, in its first
intention, a contribution to science.

There is no topic so much discussed among friends,
and none so inexhaustible, as that invariant relation of
which they have the fact before their eyes, — friend-
ship. Friendship doubtless stimulates the mind, but
chiefly to feed upon itself. As for lovers, the world
knows what secret topic occupies their conversation, and
upon what theme they bring forth endless poetry. Song
and poetry are forms which infinitely repeatable truth
must take : they thus become the mystic's specialty,
and revelation must consist largely of the song of
God. " He hath put a new song in my mouth," says
the Hebrew mystic — a song whose novelty does not
appear in its name — " even praise unto my G-od."

Not infrequently it appears to the mystic that this
poetical repetition has become the whole purpose of his
existence. " Thou hast put off my sackcloth and girded
me with gladness to the end that my glory may sing
praise to Thee and not be silent." A more literal con-
fession is found in those newly unearthed " Odes of
Solomon." " As the work of the husbandman is the
ploughshare; and the work of the steersman is the
guidance of the ship ; so also is my work the psalm of
the Lord : my craft and my occupation are his praises,
because his love hath nourished my heart." x And the
English translator of these Odes refers in his preface to
the similar expression of Epictetus : '* Well, then, since
most of you have become blind, ought there not to be

1 Ode 16, quoting with some freedom the rendering of Mr. Harris,
Cambridge, 1909.

CERTAINTY AND DOGMA 453

some man to fill this office, and on behalf of all to sing
the hymn to God ? ... If then I were a nightingale, I
would do the part of a nightingale ; if I were a swan,
I would do like a swan. But now I am a rational
creature, and I ought to praise God : this is my work ;
I do it, nor will I desert this post so long as I am
allowed to keep it ; and I exhort you to join in this
same song/' 1

The mystic consciousness is self-preoccupied ; and the
knowledge that comes from it is very largely knowledge
of itself.

This self-absorhed character of mystic knowledge
may explain why the mystics have so much to say about
" the truth " in the abstract, without suggesting what
the truth is. The mystic knows the Truth, so he assures
us : but he seems to spin hopelessly about this point,
and to come forward very slowly with any statement
of its contents.2

May it be that the mystic is more sure that he is
sure than of what he is sure, — except that he is sure

1 Discourses, Book I, ch. xvi. Tr. Geo. Long.

2 The Odes of Solomon may again illustrate the point:

"He hath filled me with words of truth, that I may speak the same.
Like the flow of waters flows truth from my mouth, and my lips show
forth his fruit. And he has caused his knowledge to abound in me; for
the mouth of the Lord is the true Word, and the door of his light."
(Ode 12.)

" He glorified me by his kindness, and raised my thought to the height
of his truth. Herein he gave me the way of his precepts ; and I opened
the doors that wore closed; and the bars of iron which I was about to
break in pieces melted and dissolved before me — nothing appeared closed
to me, because I was the door of everything." (Ode 17.)

With how much show of substance, and yet how empty of definable
content is all this celebration of "the Truth."

454: THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

of God and of his own relation to God? In these
matters, the that actually precedes the what, both in
time and in importance.

In politics, as Walter Bagehot has well shown, there
is a moment of development at which it is more impor*
tant that there should be law, than that there should be
good law : any law at all, at this moment, is good law,
because law is better than disorder. There is a moment
in religion, also, at which any God is a good God; any
absolute is a good absolute ; any certainty at all is a
matter of supreme importance. This moment cannot
last, either in experience or in reason ; but it is enough
to give color to the primary religious attitude. Any
certainty is better than no certainty ; it is good both
for the mystic and for his hearers to have touched abso-
lute assurance, on no matter what subject. To be cer-
tain has a pragmatic meaning in any case ; the man is
disposed to resolute action in general, and his resolute-
ness is able to communicate itself. The presence of
the form of assurance in the world, is the presence of
some emptiness that will gather to itself its own filling
in time ; as many an unequipped good-will by practis-
ing assurance has in time acquired some substance
of efficiency, in medicine and elsewhere. And who
knows but that the various pretences through which
boys grow into youth and manhood show also some
natural precedence of the form over the matter : any
form at all is some matter — such seems to be the rule,
a germ which in honest soil will grow. I dare say that
this preliminary law of Bagehot' s is a child of this
same religious assuredness which alone in this world is
capable of absolute command.

CERTAINTY AND DOGMA 456

Let the mystic, then, be certain of his " the truth,"
his " God's truth," and do not enviously require him
at every turn to say what the truth contains. No one
insists more than I that it must contain something, and
can be no pure ineffable zero, but in human language
we must be willing to wait for its deposit, and even to
put up with much error. The church, let me say, is
always right in claiming to be infallible. Any church
which modestly declines such pretension, any mystic
who in his main point admits that he may be mistaken,
does thereby stamp itself or himself as fraudulent. For
if one knows God, he will also know that he knows (so
truly testifies Spinoza) ; hence, although not every one
that claims certainty is true, every one that disclaims it
is false. It is among the certain ones that all true
prophets will be found. It is among the infallible
churches that all true churches will be found. What
the church chiefly has to learn is not to be infallible in
regard to too much.

The infallibility of the religious institution proceeds
from the certainty of its mystics ; it is better that they
also should not be certain of too much, should be willing
to abide in the region of being sure chiefly that they
are sure of "the truth," of the absolute. But the
mystic feels the clamor of the crowd for bread ; he has,
besides, his own internal emptiness which must be filled;
he trembles on the verge between being rightly sure
of his residual object, and being wrongly sure of some
more visible content. As a matter of natural history,
the mystic, in practical affairs, is apt to carry his assur-
ance too far. The defect of his virtue may be, that he

466 THE FRUITS OF KELIGION

becomes absolute on too slight provocation. He is the
sturdy will, which in decline may become the tempera-
mental dogmatist. It is never easy to deal with a will
of this sort, which supposes itself to be founded on an
original source of truth at once immovable and inacces-
sible. One can only watch its career (once its certainty
invades this world of sense) as of a thing of Nature,
closed in general to common instruction ; and be grate-
ful for any tendency which it may show to coincide
with reason. But the indomitable and unreasonable
person is neither a result of mysticism nor a cause;
he is a well-known natural product, widely distributed:
and while his natural firmness may be magnified by
the sanction of religion, it must at the same time be
rendered safer and truer by the essential tendency of
worship to universalize the mind and bend it to reason.
Indeed, is not mysticism the natural antidote for over-
mightiness of personal will ; and perhaps the only pro-
tection of society, in the end, against its most vehement
members? For if the Strong Man in his solitude is
not in company with the Absolute Other, his solitude is
indeed absolute, and wholly menacing. The worshipper
by the nature of his profession, must first humble him-
self before his object, and with all his strength suppress
his strength, until it begins its assertions at the zero of
all historical content. None but God can reach the
all-mighty will in its solitary origins. It is the destiny
of religion to find that difficult and all-important center
of a just infallibility, which curbs and defines all abso-
lute assurance, without disastrously abolishing it.

It is well for the mystic to dwell chiefly upon his

CERTAINTY AND DOGMA 457

absolute certainty of the absolute, and of his wholly
original relation to ancient reality. But his revelation
cannot stop here, because his experience has legitimate
bearings on other experience, and he is obliged to trace
them out. The mystic will become a knower of things
new as well as old.

Of this new knowledge, we have here to say that it
comes to the mystic in the course of his return to the
world, unsought by him. He has known God from
the standpoint of the world ; now he begins to know his
world from the standpoint of his new experience of God,
As after every new experience the familiar experiences
to which one returns are lit up with unfamiliar light,
shining out strange and reborn : so as the mystic resumes
his occupation with the many things, he finds that " all
things have become new," and this novelty he will
learn how to distil into the stock of human wisdom at
large.1

It is natural that these new impressions should be
read first in their religious bearings, and so contribute
first to the dogmatic enrichment of religion itself. From
such impressions arise those dogmas which have to do
with the world and man. If all things do contain
' memorials' or reminders of God, the mystic will see in
that fact a divine origin of the world ; and in time these
same reminders will take shape as a doctrine of the
divine Word or Logos. And as he finds reminders,
he finds also obstructions to the reminding: here

1 Says the Ode-writer: "My heart was cloven, and its flower
appeared ; and grace sprang up in it ; and it brought forth fruit to the
Lord. . . . And every thing became like a relic of thyself and a memorial
forever of thy faithful works. For there is abundant room in thy Para-
dise, and nothing is useless therein."

458 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

begin his condemnations, his contributions to law
and prophecy.1

This way of making judgments is a very common
one ; it is what we might call, judgment by compatibil-
ity or incompatibility of mood. All of our earlier
moral judgments are of this sort. A dominant per*
sonal relationship (say of child to parent) governs one's
attitude to all sorts of things, not so much through ver-
bal command, as through a perception of what would
harmonize or jar with the conscious quality of that
relationship. The recurrence of the presence of the
person gradually defines the judgment. In the case of
the mystic, the various approaches which he makes to
his God after meeting his world and judging it, become
so many questions to which he finds a yes or no, accord-
ing as his consciousness of God is accessible to him or
not- God shows thereby what he loves and what he
hates; and though there is much weary guessing as to
the reasons for the presence or the absence of divine
favor, yet in the course of time inductions emerge,
"experimental wisdom" of fairly stable sort. These
resulting judgments are thus due to what F. B. Jevona
has happily called " supernatural selection," in contrast to
the natural selection of survival by actual utility.2 And
all such judgments, social, cosmological, and moral, are
at the same time judgments about the nature of God ;
are so many developments of the knowledge of God,
made possible by this continuous alternation in experi-

1 This process also we see in the Odes of Solomon : " And I forsook
vanity, and turned to the Most High my God, and I was enriched by his
bounty ; and I forsook the folly which was diffused over the earth —
yea, I stripped it off, and cast it from me/'

9 Introduction to the history of religion, oh. viii.

CERTAINTY AND DOGMA 469

ence* The mystic's preparation is an epitome of such
empirical judgments about God, that is to say, of the
kind of disposition which God will favor. Thus the
mystic contributes little by little to the dogmatic con-
tent of religion; and these dogmas have their own
methods of trial and selection.

In this origination of new judgments, the mystics have
done their harm in the world, — being sure of things
that are only partially true. We thought that the mys-
tic would do well to be slow in concrete creativeness.
But taking the whole bulk of dogmatic utterance
together, we must still judge that the harm done is
infinitely less serious than would have been the harm
of losing that same material and the assurance with it.
The mystic's blunders have their indispensable truth ;
and partial truth may be pragmatically truer than the
completely guarded statement. Most mystic utterances
are untrue ; as, for example, most of Emerson's statements
are untrue. His continual volley of the small cartridges
of dogma is a symptom of mystical habit ; they are a
minor rill of mystical enlightenments. And doubtless
to his own knowledge and intention many of his state-
ments are partial. He writes esotericatty, that is, for
the reader who has the sense and good-will to supply
the cautions and conditions for his statements. That
word of his already quoted, "No one can harm me but
myself" is esoterically true, empirically untrue; but
how far superior to all such guarded and accurate state-
ments as we might make of it. The valid doctrines of
the church are in the same case ; their truth is literal,
but esoteric. It is capable of complete translation into

460 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

philosophic propositions about the world and man and
the Absolute, — in the course of infinite time. But
meanwhile it conveys truth to the man of good-will and
insight ; indispensable truth ; would we could also say,
" and nothing but the truth."

The mystic gives us the thing which is to be modified.
There are many who can supply the modification ; but
who else could have pulled down from heaven that sub-
stance ? In the positive dogmas of the mystic we find
absolute truth getting its first relations to facts : its
second and third and subsequent relations will be found
in time j but meanwhile we have the thing, and men can
live by it. It is the mystic's function to set theses into
the world, crude positive theses ; antitheses will come of
their own accord : but the thing that wins immortality,
after all the corrections of thought and experience, will
have personal identity with that original thesis.

Of the mystic's knowledge, then, in summary survey,
we have to say this. That the contents of ' revelation '
are twofold. There is first the certainty and praise of
God, and of the mystic's relation to God ; this knowl-
edge moves within its own circle, and has no apparent
fruit nor progress, being to an external view self-
absorbed and empty, not much else than certainty of
certainty. But secondly, there is the positive contribu-
tion of the mystic and prophet to the concrete spiritual
wealth of mankind, a creativity to which we can discern
no limit.

Thus it is that the knowledge of God which is in
intention the end of the mystic's knowledge is also its
beginning. The knowledge of the oldest becomes the

CERTAINTY AND DOGMA 461

parent of the newest knowledge. And not alone in
the domain o£ religious truth. For in the light of this
experience all other experience, we say, has become
changed and of new meaning. Many of the judgments
which the mystic now coins, judgments contributory to
science and the arts, will appear to him unparented.
They simply arise in his mind. The same, I think, may
be said of all our unparented knowledge, that knowl-
edge which we attribute vaguely to ' inspiration/ and
of which we speak dogmatically, saying, " It must be
.so " : all such knowledge has as one parent this same
original knowledge of the eternal. This will be the
thesis of our next chapter.

CHAPTER XXXI

THE CREATIVITY OF RELIGION: THEORY OF
INSPIRATION

T7IROM time to time the methods of religion have
-T impressed us as being methods fit for the origi-
nation of new thonght and of new value, if any such
thing is possible on this planet. And I believe that
we must recognize in worship the very process through
which religion becomes historically fertile in the sense
of our first speculation regarding the role of religion in
history.1 It is our purpose now to enter as we can into
the logic and meaning of the creative event, and to
sketch its re-echoings in life generally.

For creativity has its method and logic ; not such as
binds it or predetermines it, but such as gives it root,
lodgment, and effect. Any valuable creativity is far
removed from pure chance or irresponsibility in things.
It has its place and its conditions, just as in the world
of organic life, creation and birth have their own
assigned organic method and quota of energy in the
economy of the life-cycle : whether or not it is an easy
matter to define the parentage of novelty, some parent-
age it must have. The world that shall be emerges
from the world that is by the appearance of the purely
new; yet that emergence is subject to some control
and consent of the world that is : unless the present in

1 Chapter ii,

RELIGION CREATIVE 463

some fashion loves and desires the future, the future
will bear no progeny. In so far, a theory of origi-
nation is possible ; and what is more to be wished for
than insight into creativity ?

It is an old observation that moral and cognitive
ideas tend to form self-perpetuating systems; they
grope toward equilibrium, working-harmony with each
other and with experience, until they strike an arrange-
ment which goes on reproducing itself, not leading
beyond itself by any further stroke of experience.
This is the settled character, of men, races, states,
times.

The structure of such a moral system was hinted at
in several places by Aristotle. Thus in the Nicoma-
chean Ethics (n, 2), "Strength is produced by eating
much food and by undergoing much severe labor ; and
no one can do this so well as he who is strong . . .
(similarly) by abstaining from pleasures we become
temperate, and when temperate are best able to abstain.
... (In general) that same class of actions which
develops a given virtue is itself furthered and energized
by that virtue." Aristotle is observing that virtue some-
how is presupposed in acquiring virtue ; that it must
aid in its own acquisition ; l conversely, that if it is
absent we are shut out from it, as he who has no
strength is shut out from that working and eating which
produces strength. These systems, circles, groups,2
have thus an apparently fatalistic character. Only he

1 An observation that might have reconciled him with Plato if he
had pursued it farther*

9 Groups in the mathematical sense, defined chiefly by the rule that

464 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

who is already temperate can become temperate ; only
he who is already wise can gain wisdom. Aristotle
himself will admit to the study of ethics only those who
are already mature and well-trained, prepared to admit
the necessary first-premises for his reasonings. The
good he defines with a deliberate circle as that which
the good man judges to be good ; the good man being
defined, in turn, as he who values what is really good.
Thus the good and the good man adjust themselves
to each other, and recognize themselves each by the
other. There is no appeal from their position; -nor,
on these principles alone, is there any way of knowing
whether what the " good men " of any time, or of all
times, regard as good is really good. For our blind-
spots perpetuate themselves as well as our true visions :
every type of character has a conception of the good
which it sustains and is in turn sustained by. Hence
every type, good or bad, tends to lose the power of
self-criticism: the 'best* has no way of discovering
its own defects. There is no way here for growth,
novelty, creativity.1

The ultimate resistance to any innovation is this
approximate self-sufficiency of the set of ideas, moral
and other, which we already have, the tendency of

a combination of any two elements of the group according to the charac-
teristic operation of the group produces always another member of the
same group, never an object falling outside that group.

1 Whatever is, in the world, whether defective or not, tends to as-
sume the form of organic completeness, mutual self-support of parts,
self -propagation, and thus to justify its existence by immanental struc-
ture: whatever is pretends to be right. On the other hand, whatever
pretends to be self-sufficient, and to justify itself only by its group form
and self-propagating powers, is to be suspected of defect : whatever
merely w, is wrong.

RELIGION CREATIVE 465

that set of ideas to reproduce within its own kind,
exclusively. In so far as we are stupid, we can only
stupidly try to overcome stupidity ; in so far as we are
selfish, we make selfish efforts to escape the rewards
of selfishness — as by giving to charity for the sake of
treasure in heaven ; in remorse for falsity, we try to
right ourselves, yet anxiously preserving our face : and
we observe, in others if not in ourselves, that defects
are not overcome by this kind of trying. In just such
futile endeavors is not our total humanity bound, in
so far as it hopes for any genuine originality in what-
ever direction ?

But group-enclosedness can in some cases be
destroyed, as vortex-rings are destroyed, by a touch
from outside the group — a touch positive enough
to be disorganizing. And in so far as we can trace
the inner process of creative thought, such as history
has so far known, we find just such group-burstings
taking place ; and we can discern, I believe, something
of the conditions under which such burstings and origi-
nations occur.

It is indeed only in recent times that invention has
been conjoined with the power of self-description ; and
with the willingness to be autobiographical: but we
need few instances to put us in possession of the prin-
ciples at work. For invention is, in essence, no rare
event ; every soul of man that lives and works in the
world is creating at every moment of his life some
infinitesimal rill of novelty. We need then only such
examples of creativity as may bring us to consciousness
of what goes on in ourselves. We shall find that the

466 THE FRUITS OP RELIGION

moments of creation are moments in which the old is
not less, but more, intensely present to consciousness ;
it is grasped as a whole, and realizedy as for the first
time ; and in that realization we shall see emerging a
dogma of rejection, " This (old position) cannot be the
truth," "This cannot be so." Which negative dogma
will make way for a positive dogma — equally unpar-
ented so far as that moment discerns — " This contrast-
ing thing must be so," and herewith the new idea has
its footing in the world, born as something necessary
— having therefore a parentage though as yet unname-
able, a parentage which we may be able to make evident.
We may take a few instances from Tolstoy, — a mind
richly creative, dogmatic, artistic and withal trench-
antly autobiographical in all his works, making it pos-
sible to follow with advantage the beginnings of new
ideas. Here is an extract from his diary, written after
seeing an execution in Paris, long before his political
opinions had begun to take shape, — an early and nega-
tive item in the creation of those opinions :

" When I saw the head separate from the body, and how
they both thumped into the box at the same moment, I under-
stood, not with my mind, but with my wholo being, that no
theory of the reasonableness of any present progress can jus-
tify this deed ; and that though everybody from the creation
of the world on whatever theory had held it to be necessary,
I knew it to he unnecessary and bad." *

Another instance from his educational journal, on pun*
ishing a boy in his experimental peasant-school for
stealing, by hanging a placard on his buck:

1 This and the following extracts from Tolstoy are taken from Ayl-
mer Maude's Life of Tolstoy.

RELIGION CREATIVE 467

44 1 glanced at the face of the punished boy which had
become yet paler, more suffering, and harder than before, and
I thought of convicts ; and suddenly I felt so ashamed and
disgusted that I tore the stupid card off him, told him to go
where he liked, and became convinced — and convinced not
by reason, but by my whole nature — that I had no right to
torment that unfortunate boy ; and that it was not in my power
to make of him what I and the inn-keeper's son wanted to
make of him. I became convinced that there are secrets of
the soul hidden from us on which life may act, but which
precepts and punishments do not reach."

In Tolstoy's religious development, his new ideas emerge
with the same unparented certainty, as he has recorded
his experience in "My Confession." Let me quote
instances along the way of that remarkable progress.

44 One can only go on living when one is intoxicated with
life ; as soon as one is sober, it is impossible not to see that it
is all a mere fraud. . . . Sooner or later my deeds will be for-
gotten, and I shall not exist. Then why go on making any
effort. . . . How can men fail to see this ?

" I now see that if I did not kill myself, it was due to some
dim consciousness of the invalidity of my thoughts. I, my
reason, has acknowledged life to be unreasonable. But how
can reason, which (for me) is the creator of life, and (in
reality) the child of life, deny life? There is something
wrong here.

44 Then I turned my gaze upon myself, on what went on
within me, and I remembered that I only lived at those times
when I believed in Grod. As it was before, so it was now : I
need only be aware of Grod to live ; I need only forget him or
disbelieve in him, and I die. . . . 4 What more do you seek ? '
exclaimed a voice within me. 4 This is he. He is that with-
out which one cannot live. To know God and to live is one
and the same thing I ' . . . and the light did not again aban-
don me."

468 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

And now, having won for himself this ancient truth, he
finds insights arising in him of a more novel character,
but with the same dogmatic abruptness. It cannot be,
he thinks, that believers of other confessions than that
of the Greek Church are without true religion ; whence
it follows that the church must be wrong in condemn-
ing them. And with regard to war, and executions,

" It was impossible not to see that killing is an evil, repug-
nant to the first principles of any faith. Yet they prayed in
the churches for the success of our arms ; and the teachers of
fche faith acknowledged killing to be an act resulting from the
faith."

The whole spiritual history of this man is a series of
like unparented inspirations. And it is not otherwise
with minds of greater psychological sophistication crea-
tive in other fields. Psychologists are seldom autobio-
graphical, by some strange contrariety ; but Fechner,
who is of their greatest, does often write in confessional
vein, and here is a passage much to our present pur-
pose.1 Sitting on a bench in the Hosenthal at Leipzig
on a warm sunny morning with plenty to occupy his
senses, he falls to musing as follows :

" A strange illusion is this. At bottom, all before me and
about me is night and silence : the sun which so dazzles me is
in truth but a dark ball, seeking its way in darkness. ... In
this universal darkness and desolation and silence which
embraces heaven and earth there hover certain beings who but
singly and inwardly possess brightness and color and sound,
— mere points probably, which emerge out of the night and
sink back into it, without leaving behind them any vestige of
their light and sound ; who see one another, though nothing

1 From &? a»ening of his book, Die Tagesansicht gegeniiber der
Naohtansicht.

RELIGION CREATIVE 469

between them is lighted; speak with one another, though
nothing between them resounds. So it is to-day, so it was
from the beginning, so will it be to all eternity."

Now comes to Fechner the view of the natural man in
all its vehement contrast to this world-picture, which to
Fechner is but the Weltanschauung of his age by general
consent. This natural man

" believes that he sees objects about him because it is actually
light about him ; he does not believe that the sun begins to
brighten the world first "behind his eyes. . . . His illusion,
furthermore, will certainly never yield, no matter how firmly
established (by consensus of science and philosophy) may be
the knowledge that it is illusion. May it not be that this
knowledge is itself an illusion? Is it not the truth that
endures longest, — and is not that which longest endures the
truth ?

" Must not that Night- view shrink in fright from itself if
with a faithful mirror before it, it could know that it is itself
which it sees therein ? Nay, had the world at first seen the
entire hopelessness and footlessness and vanity of that view
with the clarity which came to me in that hour, it had never
been able to win its place as a World-view. And though
clarity is the last thing in these matters, the last thing will be
clarity. As surely as day follows night, so surely upon that
Night-view of the world a Day-view must follow, which will
give foundation to the view of the natural man — not contrar
diet it. And the world will appear in a new connection, in a
new light, and under new and positive points of view."

Here is the beginning of Fechner's new idea, which
with true prophecy he indicates as the idea of the gen-
eration succeeding him, the view which in our own way
we have tried to take possession of. This idea also
comes to its originator as a dogma, an " It must be

470 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

so," namely, that the view of the natural man, this per-
sistent view, is the true one.

We need look no further for instances of the creative
event : these may be typical of all, whether in art or
morals or science or religion.

In all these experiences of dawning novelty, we may
observe the same sharpened consciousness of the old or
usual idea, the idea with reference to which the new is
defined as new and different. This old idea is, as we
say, freshly realized; which means, freshly connected
with reality, especially with the reality which the thinker
is conscious of in himself — that which is realized is
" brought home, " made a conscious part of his own vivid
and literal present world. And this old idea, in being
realized, is at the same time repudiated ; repudiated, not
with any pure and blank negation, but in favor of some
positive thing which in time will make itself known. In
this realizing and repudiating, the new thing is already
asserting itself, and doing conscious work. These are
the psychological phenomena which in various propor-
tions always surround the birth of novelty.

And the event of this birth itself is to be traced, as
I think, to this touching to the quick of self-conscious-
ness: the old idea has penetrated to the self; the self
has been stung by it; and in the reflexion thereby
occasioned, the new thing is engendered. It is when
Tolstoy finds himself "ashamed and disgusted" — judg-
ing himself; it is when Fechner lets the " natural man"
in him spill his scorn on the futile theorist of his habit-
ual selfhood; it is when some deep-set love of life and
reality reaches a point of wrath and habit-breaking, or

RELIGION CREATIVE 471

in other moods, of wholly joyful inertia-killing; it is
in such moments that creation takes place. I wish,
then, in the first place, to connect the event of creation
with the event of reflexion, — that is, with the emergence
of a seZ/-consciousness out of a consciousness that is
pursuing in all smoothness the lines of the empirical
object-world.

In reflexion, the focus of consciousness shifts in such
a way that without losing wholly from sight the object
with which one has been engaged, the interest now
attaches, not primarily to that object, but to the self in
its relations with that object. These reflexive move-
ments of consciousness are, in general, occasioned by some
defeat in the ordinary inertias of the mind. As when,
in speaking, one becomes aware of throat, or difficulty
of words, or clothing. As when the hunter returns
empty from the day's chase, reflecting that, after all,
what he wanted was not so much the game as the pur-
suit. Or, as when in success one comes to the end of an
absorbing task, and finds himself at a loss what next to
do: he is for the moment "thrown back upon himself"
as upon a being who during the absorption has been
forgotten — his reflexion is occasioned by the defeat of
his usual habits of occupation and attention.

And in all such occasions the organic function of
reflexion seems to be precisely the demand of the situa-
tion for something new. The continuous thread of my
empirical self-consciousness is no doubt due to some per-
manent friction in applying my existing stock of ideas
to experience, and the persistent demand for creative-
ness thereby occasioned. We should expect reflexion to
have something to do with creation. And for the further

472 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

reason, that the Self stands permanently outside all those
closed or closing groups of mental and moral habit; the
more perfectly self-sufficient and self-propagating these
groups become, the more they fuse with the object-world
— becoming object of self hence different from self —
though in their perfect working not reminding the self
of itself. He who can revert to himself is free from all
groups, and has in himself that which can disorganize
them and see beyond them. The only question is, how
one is able to revert to himself, that is, how reflexion is
possible. For if defeat is the only occasion for reflexion,
and a self-sufficient mental group does not meet with
any defeat, we are still unable to free ourselves from
its bondage, through our inability to reflect. How is
rejlexion possible? Is not this the question to which
every critique of creativity must come?

Now my proposition is that the power to reflect
depends upon the power to find your Absolute, in the
last resort upon practical religion. It is through alli-
ance with the Absolute that man is able to reflect: it
is through his reflexion that he becomes creative of
novelty, system-destroying novelty.

Of reflexion generally, we know that it is not under
direct and complete control of the will. Self -conscious-
ness is subtle and elusive ; self-knowledge, or significant
self-consciousness, is the most difficult of knowledges.
Success in seizing that in self upon which one would turn,
in self-analysis, self-expression, discerning of one's
actual motive or actual state of feeling, depends upon a
certain gift, a genius of self-capture, a skill in fixing
the retreating shadow; and for this there seem to be na

EELIGION CREATIVE 473

rules of technical procedure. We only know that the
Other Mind is the chief aid to self-knowledge, the only
environment in which it can attain high development.
Socially-fostered reflexions may bring the individual to
the general level of social-self-knowledge : they cannot,
however, lift him above that level, and it is precisely
this social closed-group which it is most important to
break through. Here we revert to a principle already
appealed to in another context : that there is no criti-
cism of any self or system except in present view of a
positive content beyond them. And that which is out-
side every finite system, " the Not of all that man can
think or say," is precisely the absolute with which reli-
gion seeks and gains vital alliance. If God has once
been known, the world and the self must thereafter be
seen under the survey of this experience. I am able to
reflect upon any world-self system because and only
because I have already experienced something beyond
it. It is Tolstoy's certainty of God that gives him
power to criticize the Church. It is Fechner's sense
of the validity of some more primitive world-view that
separates him from the accepted "Night-view." In
brief, all of my partial reflexions are parented "by some
previous total reflexion. But total reflexion, that is,
reflexion upon the whole of things temporal, is precisely
a definition of the cognitive side of mystic experience.
And conversely, reflexion might be defined as a par-
tial mystic experience. For reflexion, like worship,
abandons the forward and outward direction of atten-
tion, and reverts inward, seeking by denial to separate
itself from immersion in the object which occasions that
reflexion, and succeeding only in so far as its denial is

474 THE FKUITS OF RELIGION

supplemented by a positive vision o£ the reality which
that object does not contain. KeHexion also illustrates
the principle of alternation ; self-knowledge and object-
knowledge growing by intervals of self-abandonment
each in the other. And the motive of worship, so far
as it is a rejection of the world, we thought to find,
even as the occasion for reflexion is found, in some
friction in the usual objective processes of the mind.
Reflexion is the generalized form which worship takes
in our experience : it is, so to speak, the agent for the
dissemination of religious attainment throughout the body
of experience. It has no necessary religious character ;
for this belongs only to the total reflexion. But all
such partial mystical movements are dependent for their
vigor and sense upon the total alternation of conscious-
ness, and what it can grasp of the Absolute and its
quality. Our "scent for reality," our "grip" upon
fact and value, are our experience of God as being
thought with. At any given time this sense of reality
is as a possession of the individual, inalienable from his
personality, his own definition and character, the most
intimate fact about him, wholly independent of his
piety or intentional relation to God. But the conditions
for the maintenance of this "instinct," for its perpetual
regeneration, and withal for its growth, require as in the
case of every instinct that we take self-conscious posses-
sion of that which is by nature present ; that this which
is thought with shall be renewed also by being from time
to time thought of and made an immediate experience.1

1 In simpler, but more barren fashion, the logic of novelty may be
exhibited thus :

Assume a point, A, which shall be outside every particular system of
thought or character, outside every group ; and adopt the general prin-

JKifiLIGION CREATIVE 475

The scope of our principle will be extended when we
observe that induction is a mental process akin to reflex-
ion. It has been regarded as typical of all invention, —
this process of induction, whereby the mind arrives at
a new law, a new synthesis, a new aperqu of essential
likeness, a new simile or metaphor, a new hypothesis, a
new speculative order among the facts of experience.
Induction is sometimes described as a movement from
parts to whole or to universal : worship and reflexion
may be described in the same terms. Induction is not
compellable by rule ; this also it has in common with
mystic experience and reflexion. No fixed method can
be laid down in logic whereby the law of a given set
of phenomena can be determined. There are good
ways of preparing yourself to discover such laws and
likenesses: but when you have followed all the tf induc-
tive methods,' you must wait for your gift. The prob-
lem 'To find the common element in a given group of
objects J has no solution ; there is no general formula
for discovering- integrals. Even simple observation is
a gift, simple observation being the elementary opera-
tion in induction; and simple observation may serve to
show the kinship we are asserting :

ciple that any such system, B, when seen from the standpoint of A, changes
its character, becoming for experience, say B'. With these two assump-
tions we have defined at once the conditions for an infinite progress in B.
For as B by reflexion from A becomes B', so B' by reflexion from the
same A becomes B", and so on. Thus endless novelty springs from recur-
rent contact with that which is eternally the same. The second of these
assumptions is equivalent to the principle formally touched upon, in chap-
ter xiv (The Need of an Absolute) : namely that Sein with Bewusstsein
gives Werden. This logical scheme is accurate so far as it goes, but has
nothing to say of the quantitative or qualitative values of the changes in
question, nor of the psychological conditions under which B is viewed
from the standpoint of A, nor of the growth of A within its own identity.

476 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

I observe nothing unless I question ; and I question
nothing unless I conceive a thing as being other than
it turns out to be. What I see at the theater and what
you see there are different things; because you are con-
scious of more ways in which the play might have been
better or other than it is. You note a trick of carriage
or voice which you trace to a certain training or racial
origin; I observe nothing but a carriage and a voice —
it does not occur to me that they have any peculiarity,
that they could have been different. I have no questions
ready, — I do not see outside of them. Simple observa-
tion is a gift: and is great hypothesis-making a gift
of any radically different sort than this of conceiving the
thing otherwise, — that the apple should not fall, or
the earth not be a plane, or the center of things else-
where than where we are? In one case as in the other,
one is helped by all manner of acquaintance with facts,
experience, imagination, training, "spreading the divine
net"; but making thereby no fore-fated capture of the
divine idea. We will ascribe the successful result
neither to chance nor to industry ; shall we say to (jemux,
thereby asserting that our indxiction has some parentage,
we know not what? Precisely so; and what is genius
again, but that same "scent for reality" whoroin reflex-
ion has its source also?

As reflexion is a judgment upon my self as a whole,
so induction is a judgment upon some external self or
class as a whole. Induction is external reflexion ; and
reflexion is internal induction. And for the most part
these operations are simultaneous, parts of the same
mental movement* It is one and the same thing to
become aware that "All the objects about me are inani-

RELIGION CREATIVE 477

mate " as to become aware that " I am alone " ; the
former is an induction, the latter a reflexion. To
observe that "All these books have fine print," and to
locate in my eyes a subtle discomfort, are probably not
two mental operations, but one. It does not flash upon
my mind in any ease that " All A's are B" without a
simultaneous exposition of self-consciousness, like the
recovery of a lost name. Ability to invent, to induct,
to discern likenesses, depends on a degree of conscious-
ness which is at the same time power to reflect, to delect
what it is in me that is restless and groping for further
predicate-giving* The inventive artist, poet, musician,
has his moments o£ prelude to idea-making in which
musing he can hardly tell whether ho is scrutinizing
his objects or the stirrings in himself. Reflection and
induction are of the same fabric, and haves tho same
conditions for success. Kvery induction Is induced by
a prior induction, ultimately by a total hntwtion, or
judgment about the whole of things, — none othor than
my whole-idea, derived from whatever knowledge of tho
whole and of God my experience) ban built up for me-
Every induction i« at the Haute time a deduction, then,
— an "Ifc must be so/* patented, though from tho
background of consciousness, by an insight which in
its origuw is

Worship then in its most gemmilisuul meaning in the
genus of which reflexion and induction, including
simple ohwrvjttion, ara species; and inyHtical movements
of the* mind, reversions to that which i« relatively total,
in infinite replication and variety, make up one half of
the whole of mental life. Herewith I think we have

478 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

taken into view in principle all phases of creativity
and invention. Invention can never be the result of a
direct effort to invent, if only because the thing' to be
invented is not yet seen. No one by taking thought
can increase his stature ; he must apply himself to that
through which the increase of stature may come : and
he who would invent would best put himself about
invention by strengthening his hold on reality. He
who would be creative in any direction would do best
to pursue that from which alone creativity can result,
a personal knowledge of the Absolute- This is that
"guidance of God" for which men may legitimately
pray, and expect answer. When the holy spirit is
come, he shall lead you into all truth ; and not other-
wise is new truth, or new value accessible to man-
kind. Thus religion is fruitful through worship; and
may we not also say, it is the one fruitful thing in
the world?

Whatever religion adds to human wealth is not
poured in, as an extraneous gift: it comes in continuity
with what that individual has known before. No man
by means of his religious insights can bo transformed
from ignorance to learnednens. The fruits of inspi-
ration are not such as labor could secure : honee they
neither displace labor, nor produce "unearned incre-
ments" in the field of human exertion.

It is true that certain of the mystics have claimed
much imparted knowledge, even of the informatory
order. Teresa claims to have received, through her
devotions, the powers of description and literary expres-
sion, and of penetrating the meaning of the Mass, though

KELIGION CREATIVE 47SV

Latin was to her an unknown tongue. The friends o£
Boehmo, it is said, would bring1 to him words from for-
eign tongues whose meaning he would divine from their
sounds. But granting to the full the historic accuracy
of stories like these, we have not made these individuals
learned. A type of education they do accomplish, qtiite
germane to the type of their mighty efforts in self-
discipline, — an education, namely, iu self-knowledge
and in human nature generally, suck as any person
with similar original effort might hardly fail to win.
But whatever self-development the mystic, receives,
he receives not without his own activity; and Ixonce
there will he no complete breach of continuity in his
knowledge.

So evident has it become to us that the inspirations
of religion bear the marks of all existing limitations, —
of character,, of times, of opinions, — that products of
stich alleged inspiration have been interpreted as the
deification of one's own thotights otherwise eHtnbliahed.
The mystic, it is said, is governed by his expectations.
The God ho sees is the God he has been led to define
to himself, by tradition and reflection. The ideal he
reaches is his own ideal., that is, the ideal of his time,
modified by lus own individual quality, and elaborated
by his own thinking. The practice of prayer i« a means,
we might think, of selecting from one's stock of ideas
certain ideas to which we wish to give a special potency
and control ; and through some process of autosugges-
tion, fixing these ideas in the seat of power. We cannot
doubt, as we review the history of sainthood, that each
saint in turn has reinforced in himself by his devotion
his own clarified personal equation, and the sentiment

480 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

of tradition. In mediaeval saintdom what do we find
in saintly character but the reproduced pictures of still
older saints, the types of perfection embodied in older
eulogies? — a certain corporate flavor which gives us,
indeed, the mid-age fragrance and romance ; but also
the mid-age mustiness, softness, impure purity, and
flabbiness of soul, — all that type of mind which in
these latter days Nietzsche has so effectively condemned,
to the great surgical benefit of Christendom. Where
else in history can we find so distinctive a spiritual
mannerism fastened upon a thousand turbulent years
with successful solidarity ? Eeligion, on this showing,
might well qualify as an apt instrument of spiritual
conservatism, perhaps even of tyranny, little fitted to
encourage originality of mind. In no case does the
good of which the mystic catches sight seem to depart
by any great gulf from the best good of his time.

Herewith the mystic finds himself accused, and not
for the first time, of opposite faults : of turning in a
fast circle, and of detached individual caprice. The
truth of which seems to me to be this : that before he
can be original he must first be as unoriginal as possible,
must first make fast whatever he can fix upon as tenable
in his spiritual environment. All of his negations are
in the interest solely of the best he yet knows ; and so
far as his preparation remains primarily his own activity,
he gets no step beyond the best he knows. Of himself
he can accomplish nothing but continuity, even of the
most binding type: no one can be more conscious than
he of his inability to " pass beyond himself/' His best
efforts do but tighten about him the net of his own
limitations. Hence the mystic's vision of the good

RELIGION CREATIVE 481

will change slowly, for the most part : but the important
matter for us, at present, is that it changes at all.

In antagonism to rash claims to supernatural enlight-
enment, free from human limitations, it is well enough
to point out the abundant presence of these ties. When
X boasts of complete novelty, it is proper for Y to exult
over every sign of antiquity he can discover in it : but,
on the whole, this is not the most genial and profitable
of occupations. " Give me a difference, a new depar-
ture," says the dialectician, "and I will show you a
likeness in the midst of that difference." Good : that
is clever, and sometimes important — but does it banish
the miracle of difference ? Since for some reason (not
wholly good) continuity seems the self-explanatory and
obvious aspect of our living, and the miracle of the
world to lie in its production of novelty, it is an obli-
gation to make our scientific most of any spark of
novelty that may be emitted by any process whatever.
In worship and its results we see everywhere limitation,
limitation even exaggerated; but limitation in the pro-
cess of overcoming itself. The right and wrong of the
traditional moral quality will infect the act of worship ;
but ask how this traditional error is to be put off, how
historically it has at last been put off — and we shall find
that it is this very act of worship which (in some form
or other) is the appointed way of escape from it. Wor-
ship is undoubtedly a bad thing, when bad men worship
— and all men are bad: but he who would therefore
abolish it abolishes his only hope of better men.

The worshipper's God will contain a magnified image
of himself — that is inevitable. But the act of bringing
one's view of self into conjunction with an actual con*

482 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

sciousness of the Absolute is an act which must do
something to disrupt the limitations of that idea. The
worship of God in human form is never identical with
the worship of man. The known God-function tends to
disjoint the humanity of the thing worshipped. What
the worshipper has before him is not man, but man
denied; man at war with all that is false in his own
humanity; man overcoming himself; man in Unter-
gang, as Nietzsche would have it, giving way to Super-
man. This process depicted in the heavens takes
place in the minds of the worshippers ; and their own
humanity exposed to the blast of their own experi-
enced absolute becomes newborn, a thing different by
some slight increment from what it was before. Every
man knows the true God, that is our first premise ; let
his God-pictures be what they may, they are all doomed
and dying pictures, pictures of the man that is being
put behind, on the way to the man that is to be.

Would I persuade my neighbor to put off his defects,
his faults of vision, his hereditary quirks and hateful-
nesses, I can accomplish nothing effective and central
but this — to show him himself in the light of his own
absolute. For to find this absolute, as the mystic finds
it, he has been obliged to reject what he can of his
empirical trappings, and most of what I despise in him
has been detected by himself, if not in his own prepara-
tory introspection and katharsis of the passions, yet in
his return from the contemplation of Deity. How shall
he detect the rest f How shall he overcome what is so
abominably rooted in him that he carries it to heaven
with him and spoils my prospects of enjoying life there ?
He may never see it ; in which case I must either wish

RELIGION CREATIVE 483

him dead, and well out of this fair universe with all his
foulness, or else I must wish him once well in the fresh
air and sun, with a more complete negation of himself,
through a better hold upon his own absolute — I must
wish him a better mystic. The only ultimate appeal of
man to man is built on man's grasp of God. And what
I can see to be true of my neighbor is not less true
of myself.

In whatever field the originator may act, or the
reformer, or the creator, his procedure will be the same.
It is as he re-takes his world, having for the love of
God turned his back upon it, that his world appears to
him new with a novelty which he is himself giving to
it or eliciting from it. He is the bearer of a treasure
of "recollection" not essentially different from that of
which Plato speaks; and under these rays whatever
object he turns upon becomes cognitively and morally
fruitful, full also of value and life. This is not the
work of the impersonal idea ; it is the work of a per-
sonal experience ; and in so far as this vision of the
absolute is his own vision, colored by his own individual
quality and resonance, his new endowment is but a
deeper spring of that factor which we sometimes call
' temperament/ sometimes ' instinct/ sometimes 'genius.'
His creation is still his own, and bears the stamp of
his individuality. His relation to his absolute has not
obliterated him, nor overmastered him : enabling him to
reflect, it has given to him himself ; enabling him to
create, it has given to him a freedom which might well
be called freedom in the concrete.

Nor does the creator create without the aid of that

484: THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

world to which he is contributing. Creating means
nothing but bringing to birth in particular historic fact
and context. Though the creator begins by destroy-
ing, that which he can never destroy nor wish to destroy
is the definite sensible existence upon which he must
knit his novelty. The true element in everything false
is the fact that it has existed, and has occupied a place
in the world of particular things ; it seems just to say
that it is the false thing (as thing, not as false) that is
the other parent of the new, in parentage giving up its
life to that which replaces it. Of all fields of human
creation that of the historic deed exhibits at its best this
continuous descent of the idea into the particular ; and
creative historic action is the supreme moral achieve-
ment. The mystic in historic action is termed the
prophet : in a study of the prophet we may span the
final term of religion's work in the world.

CHAPTER XXXII
THE PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS

WE have seen through what channels religion con-
tributes to the wealth of human life, not creating
anything for men, but creating men, conferring on
them power and freedom to create. We have now to
take the one important step which remains to complete
our view of the effective insertion of religion in the
world : namely, to enquire how human happiness and
misery are affected by religion and worship. It is the
ultimate problem of practical religion, and indeed of all
practical thought, to make reckoning, not with the
general principles on which this world is framed and
furthered, but with the actual data of fortune, the par-
ticular shapes and configurations of happening, as fate
or providence pile them up about us and with appar-
ently random distribution. It is a matter of the last
importance for any view of life whether it leads men to
find their welfare within the stream of historic circum-
stance, risk, accident, or outside of it — even though
just outside. Our philosophy and our religion take one
hue or another according as we regard our particular
fortunes as matters of chance, whose evils we must
know how to transmute and be superior to ; or as them-
selves necessary elements and ingredients of our welfare.

I

Mankind very early overcomes the illusion that his
happiness is dependent upon the possession of particu-

486 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

lar objective things wherein values lie.1 The first use
life makes of reason is to distinguish between the thing
and the value : we are not bound to honey in order to
get sweetness ; nor are we bound to sweetness to get
savor for our food ; nor to savor for satisfaction. By
a long course of experience in which our desires are greatly
generalized and provided with an immense gamut of
substitution, the world of values begins to float apart,
like a world of ghosts, between self and the world of
things, gaining embodiment in this object or in that
only by a stroke of will. No man's happiness is bound
to the possession of any particular thing unless he
himself freely binds it thereto.

And if personal choice rather than necessity must
determine the objects of my pursuit, it is personal choice
that must hold me to any adopted pursuit; my whole
relation to particular things, persons, objects beyond
myself, becomes arbitrary, tentative, liable to repudia-
tion. It is only my will, not my view of objective neces-
sity, that holds me to any given historic course. No
particular thing or definable object is necessary to my
happiness. And, alas, no particular thing or definable
object is sufficient for it. There is a thorough absence
of correspondence between values and historic objects.
A certain alienation from history results in this way
simply from universal experience.

And, in the main, this freedom from things has been
an advantage. So great is the contingency in the
matter of historic success in controlling any particular

1 The outline of the following argument was first stated in an address
before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Leland Stanford University,
entitled " The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Human Happiness."
Parts of that address I have used in this chapter.

THE PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS 487

object, so difficult the acquisition of assured power, so
elusive these visible vessels of our values, especially
those more precious living objects of love and social
pride, that no degree of independence has been thought
too great. Religion for the most part has found it well
not to diminish but to emphasize and enlarge this natural
separation of ours from the material and particular
prisons of our happiness.

Philosophy, too, has worked in the same direction ;
reminding men to what extent each one is the maker
of his own happiness, to what extent all the necessary
conditions for happiness lie within the self, and not at
all out there iu history and circumstance. To be " phil-
osophical " is nothing other than to practise this belief.
Every age has its seer who renews this ancient doctrine.
We listen to him and believe him : it seems that all
assurance of happiness depends on finding it a wholly
inward affair, and even that all justice requires it. For
in so far as welfare depends on external things, some of
its conditions will be beyond control: those who succeed
will succeed in part by leave of circumstance ; and there
will be those that fail without fault of their own, and
without recovery. Hence men have always demanded
of the sage, " Teach us to be happy," as if this were
indeed an art open to every one who can possess himself,
let fortune be what it may, an art of the inner man, not
of external mastery.

Hear the words of Maeterlinck, who with inimitable
union of power and art has made this doctrine a liv-
ing force in our own time: "It is true," he writes,
"that on certain external events our influence is of the
feeblest ; but we have all-powerful action on that which

488 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

these events shall become in ourselves. Nothing befalls
us that is not of the nature of ourselves. The event
in itself is pure water that flows from the pitcher of
fate, and seldom has it either savour, or perfume, or
colour. But even as the soul may be wherein it seeks
shelter, so will the event become, joyous or sad, tender
or hateful, deadly or quick with life. I do not pretend
that destiny is just. (But) there is nothing in the world
more just than happiness, nothing that will more faith-
fully adopt the form of our soul, or so carefully fill the
space that our wisdom flings open."1 The controlling
conditions of welfare lie within, and not in that current
of outer event, the current of history, or as Maeterlinck
calls it, of destiny.

And have we not in our own analysis of value con-
cluded that worth is conferred on things, not by their
intrinsic qualities, but by that with which we think them?
It is the idea that creates what beauty, what desirability
of any kind, things seem to possess ; it is not in their
power to rob us of this, — it is not in their power to
make or mar our happiness. Happiness, may we say,
is the idea of the Whole in unhindered operation upon
experience. He who knows God knows how to be
happy in this world, having in himself both the source
of positive value and that by which all pain can be
transmuted.

We tend, I say, to believe such doctrines as these ;
it seems that we must believe them, or condemn the
world. On the other hand, we feel uneasy under them.
They seem to leave us without a full and sufficient

1 Wisdom and Destiny, tr. A. Sutro, pp. 28, 29, etc.

THE PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS 489

warrant for historic action and effort. These are, after
all, stoical doctrines at heart; the stoic would have
us sufficient in ourselves : and yet, if we examine the
sources of his strength we shall find that the stoic sage
is depending upon a sense of intimate kinship with that
very destiny to which he professes himself superior.
" Nothing for me is too early or too late, 0 Universe,
which is in time for Thee." That which makes it
possible for such a thinker to open himself to affection
and to experience is a magnificent faith in something
outside himself. Such a shut-in-ness as can encounter
no solidity of value in the world beyond, and is without
assurance of any other victory than that of its own
poise or of its own value-creations is necessarily without
power of self-abandonment. The pride of crcatorship
in this realm of values, which is indeed the highest
prerogative of our individual selfhood, may turn to the
veriest curse at the moment when the goods in our
hands appear to us as nothing but our own creations.
Creation is a solitary business; we are therefore not
surprised to find here and there a soul, lofty in this
citadel of inner values, smitten with the horror of
imprisonment in its own freedom, ready to accept any
touch of fate, ready to cry out, " Strike, sacred Reality,"
if it may but regain the sense of validity outside.

Self-sufficient we cannot be. And this truth our
theory of value has taken into account. For that
whole-idea cannot be had by any but the completest
exposure to the world of objects; nor can the vigor
and integrity of that idea be maintained by any self-
enclosed determination of the will, but only by resort-
ing to its source in experience. Nevertheless, the con-

490 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

ditions for happiness do still lie outside history, do they
not ? The current of particular event has no decisive
importance for our welfare. We love life ; but we love
it as second-best, as a region wherein the idea meets
resistance. The mystic has found his absolute object
by help of negation after negation ; he is free not indeed
from reality, but from all particulars ; he waits as one
whose chief good is delayed — as one reconciled with
God, and also as a fruitful and useful citizen, but as
one who has no absolute treasures laid up here where
moth and rust corrupt, and where the thieves of cir-
cumstance break through and steal. What has our
mystic, then, to do with fortune ?

II

In order to answer this question, we shall have to
develop a stage further our account of the inner nature
of happiness. Happiness we know has its quantitative
variation : it increases with the body of idea we can
bring to bear on any subject ; it is in large part a mat-
ter of horizon. The happy man in any situation is the
man to whom that situation is no cave, who in the midst
of it can hold his broader bearings, bringing to it the
quiet sense of affairs and, in the end, of eternity. The
institution in which I am a conscious factor ; the state,
which flings over a petty personal existence a large
dome, a dome of concrete inclusiveness and eternity,
any totality of which I form an actual part, the crowd
in which I am able to lose myself, even the sense of my
own insignificance as a forgotten cog in the wheels
of universal event — all of these add to the quantity of
my happiness. But while happiness may be much or

THE PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS 491

little, there is here no account of unhappiness, which
is a matter of quality not of quantity of experience. It
is the question of unhappiness that we have now to
face.

On its inner side, I think we must say of unhappiness
that it is in all cases a matter of conscious conflict, that
is, of divided attention or distraction. I am unhappy
whenever my idea is torn between two or more ohjects
that claim it. For instance, he who is unable to bury
himself in anything because of the simultaneous
demands of everything else, is clearly in so far simply
unhappy. If guilt causes unhappiness, it is through the
disruption of selfhood caused by the unbanishable call
of ignored obligations. If sorrow is unhappy sorrow,
it is because of some persistent conflict, as between a
beloved past and the insistent present objects of atten-
tion, the unwelcome necessity perhaps of living on and
away from that past. And even of physical pain ; if it
is able to suspend happiness for a moment, it is because
it half succeeds in pinning consciousness within the
focus of its own event. More than half the pain of
pain is the imprisonment of personality, and the unequal
struggle of the spirit to get free and be itself. Unhap-
piness is dividedness of mind.

And this notion of unhappiness is corroborated by
the fact that whatever wipes out our fragmentation and
induces in us a wholeness of attack gives back the
happiness which is continually slipping from our grasp.
Such, in general, is the function of recreation and art,
of worship and all its partial analogues, so far as they
bear directly on happiness, not merely to enhance our
idea, but to reunite its fragments. Art instils into us

492 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

its own unity; and especially music, which combines
the movement of a restless will with the peace of a
completed totality. It matters not how we regain our
singleness of thrust — whether by the ascent of a hill,
or in prayer, or through a book or a human being : the
ground of the blessedness of such a moment, and of
the moments of action that issue from its canopy, lies
in its power to recall the divergent channels of our
attention into unity, to u make us whole " from center
to limit of our mental range, for the purposes of the
next undertaking. Psychologically speaking, happiness
may now be described as the continuous undivided
consent of my whole-idea to the experience or activity
at hand ; and the empirical mark of happiness is concen-
tration, or enthusiasm of action. To the happy man,
things and deeds appear worth while ; his actions meet
the mark, and rebound to enhance his energy for the
next stroke ; whereas those of the unhappy man strike,
if at all, like spent bullets, or shatter, and contribute
nothing to his self-continuance. Whatever restores
wholeness in action restores happiness.

Happiness, on this showing, does certainly not depend
immediately on external things at all, but upon our own
inward mode of dealing with them. If it were within
our power to throw the whole force of our idea, at will,
upon any object : there could be no content of experi-
ence however hideous, or painful, or spiritually grievous,
which could make us unhappy. But is it possible, or
even conceivable, that attention could be so brought
within the will? There is something paradoxical even
in such a supposition. For if it were true, then no

THE PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS 493

event of failure could dethrone any one's happiness;
we should be unable to attach unlimited importance to
the outcome of any finite enterprise; that is, we should
be unable to give whole-hearted attention to the enter-
prise; and hence, by hypothesis, we should be unhappy.
For we can give ourselves with but half a will to under-
takings whose failure can alter no real value. It seems
a condition of happiness that happiness should be
destroyable by failure ; otherwise we could hardly treat
any present task as worth the effort of our whole will.
The type of attention requisite for happiness seems to
depend on a belief during the course of any effort that
the object thereof is worth my whole devotion : and I
cannot at the end of such effort, if I fail, thereupon
repent my belief or change it. There is some sophistry
well known to proverb and fable in allowing defeat to
contradict the theory of the endeavor— namely, that the
grapes were really worth having. Defeat, then, must
necessarily split attention, leave me divided between
this fact to which I must attend because it is the pres-
ent reality, and that nolrpresent object to which my
whole effort and belief had prepared me to attend.
Defeat must necessarily split attention and create unhap-
piness, unless in some way it is possible, in the pursuit
of definite ends, to combine an unlimited attachment
with an unlimited detachment.

Ill

That such paradoxical attitude is possible is indeed
suggested to us by certain familiar facts of experience.
Something like a union of perfect attachment with
perfect detachment does exist in the consciousness of the

494 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

good sportsman, or of the good experimentalist. To
the good sportsman, defeat in any contest must not
leave bitterness behind, nor either diminish the entire
enthusiasm for the next attempt. As for the good
experimentalist, his failures become sources of satisfac-
tion to him just in proportion as he has spent every
effort to make them succeed : for the withholding of
any effort leaves it uncertain whether or not the failure
is a genuine failure, and need not be tried again ; here,
perfection of attachment is evidently a condition for
completeness of detachment. And we can see, also,
that these attitudes are largely applicable to fortune
generally. To some measure, the happiness of life
depends upon a perfection of the game spirit : to " get
mto the game" accepting its rules and its risks, has
been given as the best available rule for human hap-
piness. Something hypothetical or even histrionic
seems to enter into our conduct with this temper ; we
assure ourselves that we are staking our whole souls
on this issue or that, but we know in our hearts that
we are not; we know that defeat, if it comes as it
always may, will not destroy our integrity of spirit,
and therewith our happiness.

So much the wisdom of life suggests; and it leaves
us indeed external to history, superior to it, even in a
relation of moral irony toward it. We play as if our
treasure were there, knowing that it is not; and we
must so play, or lose even that happiness which, in
striving, we have. Is this a satisfactory attitude toward
history? Is drama, play, a certain inward duplicity in
our enthusiasms, tolerable on the whole, as perhaps it
may be tolerable in tentative fragments of living? Is

THE, PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS 495

"the game" our last adjustment to destiny? Is it
not rather itself a division of mind, and a fundamental
unhappiness ; an alienation, even though a subtle one,
from the world in which we must perforce act, from the
particular to which we must perforce attend ?

The modern forms of stoical doctrine exhaust all
ingenuity to overcome this breach and to reunite with
active history the soul which they have fundamentally
detached therefrom. They assure us that welfare lies
in the pursuit, not in the winning ; from which it follows
that we must mightily pursue and act even though
nothing is to be captured. Or we are shown that the
world of particulars and accidents is here to produce in
us the moral temper, to develop the soul : it is, as Fichte
would have it, the externalized material of our duty —
whence we must strenuously open ourselves to experi-
ence for the love of our character, regardless of empirical
outcome. Or, after all, the great interest is just knowl-
edge and consciousness itself, which can never be sub-
served by any withdrawal from facts nor injured in
their untowardness. This is Maeterlinck's point of
view, and it seems to me the best possible statement of
the case : " To the sage, truth can never be bitter. He
finds more pleasure in the attempt to understand that
which is, than in the attempt to believe that which he
desires. There is no gain in shutting out the world,
though it be with walls of righteousness." Conscious-
ness, self-knowledge, knowledge of man and of reality,
— this is the great result of our insertion in history —
nothing else matters. " Destiny has only the weapons
t?e give her. She is neither just nor unjust, nor does

496 THE FRUITS OP RELIGION

it lie in her province to deliver sentence on man. She
whom we take to be goddess is a disguised messenger
only, come very simply to warn us, on certain days of
our life that the hour has sounded at last when we
needs must judge ourselves." In all the literature of
Stoicism there is no finer conception than this of the
way in which the disenfranchised soul is yet held in
whole-hearted attachment to the detail of fortune.

But the ruses are not successful ; the will cannot thus
be decoyed into unreserved espousal of the pursuits of
life. The world of common action having no part in
the absolute end, being there as a means only, becomes
touched with a sense of incomplete reality or illusoriness,
such as we discern in the atmosphere of Maeterlinck's
earlier writings. It fails to hold that concentrated
allegiance of the idea which is necessary to happiness.
The inadequacy of the stoical principle even in its best
forms has impressed itself on our racial instinct, and
the world generally has taken refuge in another prin-
ciple, that of altruism, or vicarious happiness. Success
there must be, but it need not be my success : mastery
of fortune there must be, but it need not be my mastery.
Let me but know or believe in some power that is con-
trolling or shall control physical event and history ; then
the event begins to have a meaning : and I can find my
happiness in the assured victory of that power, though
free as any stoic from the need of victory in my own
person. History has entered into the absolute goal of
things as a member ; and all history thereby becomes
contributory and important.

THE PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS 497

IV

The language of the altruistic principle is familiar to
us. It is the language at once of resignation and hope.
It is the language of the patriot: "I may fail, but the
idea of liberty must conquer " ; " This measure of mine
may be defeated, but the policy or cause must triumph."
It is often the language of the scientist; or again of
the parent who regains in his sons the hope for all that
he has not himself accomplished. Such vicarious hap-
piness must be, in fact, the greater part of the actual
joy of any living man ; for no one can reach maturity
without identifying his happiness to some extent with
the welfare of his friend, the success of his party, or
the establishment of his opinion, quite apart from any
prosperity of his own. The scope of this principle is
universal ; and taken together with the prevalent belief
that all cosmic affairs are so connected that they form
a single history in which all can participate, it offers a
plausible solution of our dilemma — to many minds, the
only possible solution. For in such an interconnected
world as this, every being must lie open to every other :
vicarious joy can be no more actual than vicarious suf-
fering, so long as we take into our survey anything less
than the whole movement of life. The same knowledge
or sympathy that brings in upon me the joy of remote
triumph brings in also the more pungent distress of the
many near defeats. In the race there can be no per-
fection till all are perfect, no complete happiness till all
are happy. What sure triumph, therefore, can there
be for any except in the common end, indefinitely dis-
tant, the end wherein all triumph ; and what present

498 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

happiness can there be save in that consummate vica-
riousness of interest which makes the goal of all history
the justification for all that now is ?

This principle has its religious heightening ; it is even
the sum total of what many understand by religion.
Thy will be done: is not this the act wherein the indi-
vidual definitely identifies his own success with the
success of the Highest, rising thereby superior to his
own fortunes without being dissevered from whole-
hearted historic action?

And it has also its philosophical expression. It seems
to me that Royce has brought this principle of altruism
to its philosophic fulfilment. It is indeed impossible
to seize fragments from a thought so vast and organic
as his without danger of misrepresenting it; but I
must venture to quote from a chapter wherein, dealing
with our interminable struggle against the evils of our
finite existence, Royce summarizes the conditions which
may secure to us such happiness as we can certainly
command.

" In all this my own struggle with evil, wherein lies
my comfort? I answer, my true comfort can never lie
in my temporal attainment of my goal. For it is my
first business, as a moral agent, and as a servant of God,
to set before myself a goal that, in time, simply cannot
be attained. . . . Wherein, then, can comfort truly be
found ? I reply, In the consciousness, first, that the ideal
sorrows of our finitude are identically God's own sor-
rows . . . and in the assurance, secondly, that God's
fulfilment in the eternal order is to be won through the
very bitterness of tribulation . . . through this, my
tribulation." And as for the less noble ills that "seem

THE PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS 499

not to have, for our present consciousness, any ideal
meaning . . . Our comfort here lies in knowing that
in all this life ideals are sought, with incompleteness
and with sorrow, but with the assurance of the divine
triumph in Eternity lighting up the whole." *

Thus to conceive my finite experience sub specie
aternitatis is not merely an emancipation from evil, it
is our essential and positive achievement of happiness.
It is the experience in which " our temporal life is even
now the expression of the eternal triumph " ; and through
this act of knowing I become an actual partaker in that
triumph. It is this conception of the eternal which
makes a vicarious happiness possible : and it is vicarious,
in so far as my present relation to that will is one of
loyalty primarily, not of comprehension; my present
attitude to fortune, one of resignation, not of control.
What this eternal triumph is, I do not know; I only
know that it is real: and this, for Koyce, is enough.
"Strengthened by that knowledge, we can win the most
enduring of temporal joys, the consciousness that makes
us delight to share the world's grave glories and to take
part in its divine sorrows."

V

These truths do deeply touch the original springs of
human happiness. Such knowledge of the eternal Pur-
pose and loyalty to it must be a great part of any real
welfare. Vicariousness of mind is wholly necessary to
happiness ; ensuring the widest scope of that idea-world
whereby all things must be appreciated that are appre-
ciated. Have we not already found in altruism the

1 Tlie World and the Individual, vol. ii, pp. 407 ff.

500 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

largest possible contribution to personal welfare ; l and
in companionship the experience which can transmute
all pain ?2 Vicariousness is wholly necessary ; and were
it not for that fatal separation from one's own immedi-
ate concerns, might be regarded as sufficient. But the
vicarious principle cannot heal this division ; hence it is
not final.

For vicarious happiness is, by its nature, independent
(or relatively independent) of my personal success in
any present undertaking. So far from supplying an
adequate motive for treating this present business as of
infinite importance, it is essentially a refuge from the
contingencies of that business. It does not remove nor
evade misfortune ; but when misfortune comes, it relieves
it by distributing the shock through the whole range of
my vicarious interests. He who loves the whole has
resources beyond himself in his own evil hour. But
the question of that particular evil is not met ; one is
simply lifted above it or borne through it by his attach-
ment in the absolute. One is consoled, but not restored
to confidence in the worth of his own action. Our prin-
ciple has no launching powers ; its attitude toward evil
and misfortune is essentially passive : it is always one of
comfort after the fact, never of adoption before the fact.

But surely we have not attained human manhood
with reference to the ills of our destiny until we can go
to meet them, instead of waiting in philosophic discom-
fort for them to surprise us. He whose deed is dragged
from him is not owner of that deed ; and he who must
pass out of his own conscious will for comfort, cannot
wholly return to this same conscious will for the coun-

i Chapter xi, p. 136. * Chapter xv, p. 222 ff.

THE PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS 501

sels of positive action. No man, I venture to say, can
be wholly happy in defeat unless he foreknows and
goes to it, not as Napoleon to his island, but as Socrates
to his death. Not resignation, but renunciation, is
the greatest and last of the virtues in presence of the
ultimate enemies of our fortunes. And not blank renun-
ciation, but renunciation made significant by some
consciously known purpose which in the midst of defeat
is not defeated. Only thus can the will return whole-
heartedly to the charge. No vicarious or indirect
mediation can supply me with the necessary integrity
of interest in this present undertaking. In short, no
man can be happy, nor ought to be, without a conscious
control of his own fortune ; without a fundamental and
necessary success of his own in dealing with the world
of objects beyond him.

This is a hard saying: for it demands what both
altruism and stoicism have assumed to be impossible, a
power over facts even in the midst of our finite circum-
stances. Nevertheless, I believe that we must either
make this requirement, or abandon the attempt to find
happiness in the world. This latter course is alwayd
open to us, and is virtually adopted by most ; but at a
greater cost than they think, that of relinquishing the
hold of religion upon human history.

Altruism, not less than stoicism, leaves me unsure of
the worth of my present act and purpose : that present
act is liable to be defeated by an event, which even
though it reveal to me the will of God or my own
deeper will, must hold over my undertaking a shadow
of invalidity. I can never taste the quality of genuine
happiness, namely, perfect belief in and devotion to

502 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

my own undertaking. I am a necessarily diminished
and divided being : I am to act, but another than I is
to succeed. And not less than in the case of stoicism
does such an attitude impose upon myself and upon my
world, in time, an air of unreality. For while God and
Nature first become real to me because they determine
me ; they can only remain real, in so far as I also can
successfully determine them, and as I intend. Men's
mental horizons always tend to shrink beneath what
their passive experience shows them as real ; they
tend to coincidence with the sphere of their conscious
efficiency. Religions of nature and of humanity appeal
to men chiefly because here are purposes whose mean-
ing we think we can share, and effectively promote,
even as we intend. The earth is real to me in part
because it resists me; in part because it yields to me
and I can recognize my own works in solid rock. Were
there no sure succeeding there, earth and I would speed-
ily become unreal to each other. Reality must be
defined as the region wherein I can identify my happi-
ness with my own success ; not alone with the success
of another.

Indeed, I can only know and understand an Other in
so far as our object-worlds, and our objective goods like-
wise, are the same : hence, in whatever sense God is to
triumph in history, in that same sense must I triumph
also. In some degree, as we have seen, every soul of
us knows the whole, and feels in his own limbs the thud
and the impulse of the engines of reality : it must be
possible, then, for our wills, to the same degree, to con-
tain the will of the universe. We must be able to reach
a kind of maturity in respect to God himself, in which

THE PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS 503

we are ready to assume the burden not only of omnis-
cience— as we continually do — but also of omnipo-
tence, with regard to some fragment, however minute, of
the historical work of the universe. In such a moment
the act which we should utter would be known as a com-
pletely real act; and since we cannot separate our own
reality from the reality either of our objects, or of our
deeds — we too become for the first time completely
real.

To require this of the world is to require what we
may call the prophetic consciousness. By the pro-
phetic consciousness I do not mean a knowledge that
something is to happen in the future, accomplished by
forces beyond myself: I mean a knowledge that this
act of mine which I now utter is to succeed and hold
its place in history. It is an assurance of the future
and of all time as determined by my own individual
will, embodied in my present action. It is a power
which knows itself to be such, and justly measures its
own scope. I do not say as yet that an assurance like
this is possible ; still less that it has ever been attained :
I say only that it is necessary for happiness — that with-
out it this region of historical fact must stand condemned
as outside the sphere of either justice or reality. Apart
from the possibility of prophetic consciousness, this
region must be to our wills a " realm of chance" —
just such a realm as Hegel and Boyce and Howison
agree with James in accepting — impenetrable to the
Spirit, and ultimately repellent to the Spirit ; wherein,
therefore, the Spirit can never be wholly naturalized
and at one with its own existence.

to* THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

VI

If this demand for prophetic consciousness seems
preposterous, it is chiefly, I must think, because our
various philosophies of life have persuaded us of its
impossibility ; and we will be reconciled, even though
half-heartedly, with what is attainable — a bowing-
down which is the modern form of devil worship.
Further, the love of power, of which this prophetic
consciousness is but a sublimation, is associated in
theory with the ruthless, the violent, the competitive,
the relentlessly self-assertive, as in the philosophies
of Hobbes and Nietzsche. Only a few can command
success of this sort ; and that at such moral cost that
we repudiate the ideal, and seek our happiness in some
other faculty. But may it not be that this instinctive
love of power which is in every human creature needs
only to be raised to the dignity of prophecy to lose
both its cruelty and its incredibility ? May it not be
that these philosophers of the Wille zur Macht have
but labored to preserve to us our confidence in the chief
moral element of our nature ?

For when we consider the facts of life, such an expe-
rience as this, a knowledge of necessary historic com-
mand of fortune, is neither hypothetical nor unknown,
nor yet confined to the careers of violence. • Moments
of world-shaping prophecy are indeed rare enough in the
records, even if the records are to be believed. And
yet it is not meaningless that men whom we otherwise
respect have, in certain critical passes of their experi-
ence, claimed this for themselves ; they have left it at
least ideally open to our attainment. Do we not recall

THE PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS 505

utterances o£ Ptah Hotep, of Socrates, of Alexander,
of Dante, Spinoza, Montesquieu, Hugo, Froebel, Pitt,
Browning, Disraeli, sent out in the teeth of hostile cir-
cumstances, asserting a sense of invincibleness in their
historic position ? There are false prophets also ; but
we ask only whether there be any true ones. And we
have not to depend on the reports, perhaps the boasts,
of others' experiences. We may assume that whenever
a supreme type of experience is possible to human
nature, it will have numerous analogues and anticipa-
tions scattered throughout our common experiences.
If the prophetic consciousness is possible, it will not be
left without a witness here.

I am inclined to think, as I examine our ordinary
commerce with physical facts and with social partic-
ulars such as history is made of, that our consciousness
of command is the rule, while tentativeness and defeat
are the exceptions. Skill is possible in a thousand
ways ; and skill is an experimental dealing with facts
which has reached the point of assurance. Active life,
like the life of thought, is built on the basis of concrete
certainty. Our conscious enterprise is ^three-fourths
experiment ; but it steps out from a vast substratum of
the indubitable. If our bodily existence is itself a
kind of instantaneous and perfect command over a
limited range of physical nature, our active existence
has a like range of primitive certainty which defines the
level of the species. A. man is he who can infallibly
exercise or acquire a certain minimum of assured power
over facts, in work and speech and habit; man is
defined by a certain high level of assumable power.
The child must be taught to doubt, not to be confident

506 THE FKUITS OF RELIGION

of success ; the proud prophetic attitude is the native
air of our existence, and can no more be wholly can-
celled by our numerous defeats than can our conscious-
ness of deity.

But our more significant prophetic experiences lie on
the other side of experiment ; they come to us as skill
assimilates itself to nature, and imitates the fundamen-
tal certainty with which it fuses. A well-defined and
limited consciousness of power seems to me to be the
essential fruit of mature self-knowledge. May not an
orator command his audience, and know that he must
do so, as simply as a child commands the ear of a parent?
In such powers we all share. For all language, and all
expression of every kind, is just such a process of mak-
ing historic and actual certain experiences which at first
are but private meanings of my own : and in so far as
I can be sure that these private meanings are indeed
universally valid, I may undertake with certainty to
utter them. If I know, as I do, that my own experi-
ence of physical nature is an experience universal and
sharable, it may be that beliefs, emotions, reasonings,
principles, should appear to me with a like universality.
And it is not uncommon to see men so convinced of this
necessary acceptance of their idea that they are willing
to persist in uttering it in face of universal repudiation,
sure at the same time that they know their fellows
better than they know themselves. Often we find our
poets dealing in just such generous prophetic insistence
with our common lives, knowing that what they express
is no private sentiment, but the typical and universal
sense of man. We remember, among others, the
"Non omnis moriar" of Horace; and of Shakespeare,

THE PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS 507

" Yet do thy worst, old Time." And this of Francis
Thompson,

" I hang 'mid men my needless head,
And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread :
The goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeper
Time shall reap; hut after the reaper
The world shall glean of me, me the sleeper ! "

The more visible modes of prophecy, however, appear
in those regions of experience where human happiness
reaches its common height, namely in the more intimate
personal relationships. No one is lover who does not
prophesy: and this prophecy reaches its summit in
the most presumptuous of all commands, tf% Follow me."
In all friendship we say we have the debt of loyalty,
and find our happiness in loyalty : yet loyalty is that
one element of mutual living which nothing but a
prophetic consciousness can explain. Nothing but a
prophetic consciousness, a foreknowledge of the power
of success in this difficult relationship, can justify the
vows of marriage as they have been made : and any less
binding vow is so much less than moral. Love itself
seems to have such prophetic bearings, whether truly
or falsely; it summarizes and discounts all obstacles
in advance, and instates itself in unquestioning com-
mand of life and body. Love at least must postulate
prophecy.

Our prophetic experiences begin in our immediate
personal context. Our first acquired and conscious
historical powers are powers over the free agents of
history — our fellow persons. From this focus our
prophetic range spreads itself outward, largely through
the conductive medium of men and institutions, until it
reaches and claims the services of all matter. Prophecy

508 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

accepts and stands upon all these acquired and distrib-
uted powers, such as they are, and fuses them into single
deeds, addressed to particular situations, deeds which
know their place and their meaning, and which shake
themselves free from the contingencies of the progres-
sive experiments of mankind, for the purposes of their
own moment.

Moreover, the consciousness of historic validity is not
limited to such single deeds as these. The form of
command, as power perfects itself, tends to become
non-assertive, silent, and immediate, conveyed with the
temper of attitude and action : and as personality
acquires this more perfect poise, the exercise of pro-
phetic power may become continuous, not simply con-
centrated in climactic performances. The effect of such
silent and continuous command may be nothing more
than this, that things grow in its presence. But this,
if we have not been mistaken, is what chiefly happens
in the presence of God. This also is historical action.

VII

These are the common foundations of our action.
And if there be any such thing as a more total and
significant prophecy than these, it will have the same
structure as they : it will be the whole of which our
various experiments are parts. Happiness may be iden-
tified with success in the utterance, not of fragmentary
meanings here and there, but of some total meaning ;
the indelible historic expression of a self. It cannot
fail to be at some high cost that a man may come to
recognize his own total and universal meaning, and
impose that upon the course of things. Some complete

THE PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS 509

commitment to that aim might well be necessary. And
such commitment will not leave him to suffer that pain
alone which may reach him by diffusion ; it will put
upon him the necessity of courting pain, even of creat-
ing pain for others where none now exists, rousing
them from their ease and exciting their wrath. It is
well for us that every man has his quantum of the
belligerent spirit ; for it is as necessary to our happiness
to have found and defined our proper antagonism as to
have found and defined our proper love. Enthusiasm
can exist on no other terms ; for enthusiasm is not energy
merely, but energy conscious of a potential difference.
When we have caught the spirit of this kind of detach-
ment we discover that the outer dimension of ourself
varies with the greatness of the thing we are over
against quite as truly as with the greatness of the thing
allied to us. We take a fierce joy in the power to per-
fect that detachment by simplification, by renunciation,
demonstrating to ourselves that we have the power to
renounce, to deny, to oppose — to send our plowshare
deep, so that when it moves, as it must, a huge segment
of sluggish, inert earth will be disgruntled and dis-
placed. We find re-entering into our souls those lost
virtues of war and asceticism — virtues which can
never be artificially fostered or reclaimed.

In such a temper as this are strangely combined the
self-sufficiency of the stoic, the universality of the
altruist, and that righteous love of power which our
own age at once celebrates, fears, and decries. The
prophet is the realization of all these human motives ;
and it is he whom all these have in mind as the super-
man, who is also the sage, and the man wholly happy

510 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

in his historic context. Is it not he whom Maeterlinck
has in mind, even while he praises the stoic virtues ?
" To those round about us there happen incessant and
countless adventures, whereof every one, it would seem,
contains a germ of heroism; but the adventure passes
away, and heroic deed is there none. But when Jesus
Christ met the Samaritan, met a few children, an adul-
terous woman, then did humanity rise three times in
succession to the level of God." This is that "con-
sciousness of self which "with the greatest of men
implies consciousness up to a point of their star or their
destiny " ; and not alone because " they know in advance
how events will be received in their soul," but because
m addition to this they also know what they will do
with these events, and what stamp history will carry as
it falls back from that encounter.

Shall we not acknowledge, then, that the prophetic
consciousness is a wholly credible experience, abun-
dantly indicated in the ideals as well as in the instincts
of men as the concrete conception of happiness? And
if we regard it as necessary for happiness, we do not
thereby wholly condemn our experience even as we find
it. It is certainly not necessary for happiness that
every undertaking should succeed, that there should be
no failures : it is only necessary that as our buffeted lives
labor for the most part between our two great refuges
— stoicism and vicarious satisfaction — it should still
remain open to us to believe that these lives may have
some total historic meaning, and that this meaning can,
through whatever discipline or observance, be brought
to consciousness and valid expression. If we can believe
this, history can never become wholly alien to us.

THE PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS 511

But how and when does the hour o£ such total
prophecy arrive ? Is there to be a moment when not
alone the hero, the patriot, the sage, hut the simple
man of quiet life and plain speech, may lay aside the
attitude of humility, cease to admit his possible failure,
and take control of the history which at that moment
is enacting itself in his presence ? Must there come to
every one an hour when the connection between the suc-
cess of his cause in the world and the success of his own
deed lies clear before him, turning vicariousness into
cowardice ; when he knows beyond doubt that the arc
of the destiny of that idea must now coincide with the
swing of his own arm ? In what form does prophecy ar-
rive ? And how is the prophetic consciousness possible ?

VIII

My answer is that the prophetic consciousness is
possible in the same way that reflexion is possible, in the
same way that a total present judgment upon the world
is possible. The prophet must know himself; and he
must know his world, not in detail but in so far as it is
relevant to his purpose : such knowledge as this must
come to him through his relation to the absolute. The
prophet is but the mystic in control of the forces of
history, declaring their necessary outcome: the mystic
in action is the prophet. In the prophet, the cognitive
certainty of the mystic becomes historic and particular ;
and this is the necessary destiny of that certainty : mystic
experience must complete itself in the prophetic con-
sciousness. The lightning of Zeus is not released until
already it is f orefated to strike the earth ; in this trans-
action heaven and earth must break away together. So

512 THE FRUITS OP RELIGION

whatever certainty the mystic acquires means and fore-
tells a positive overcoming of the world : he can only keep
his certainty by making it visible to himself in historic
accomplishment. Prophetic power is the final evidence
to each individual that he is right and real ; it is his
assurance of salvation ; it is his share of divinity ; it is
his anticipation of all attainment. Hence it is that the
greater mystics have been great founders, great agita-
tors, and have if not a heavenly immortality yet unques-
tionably a mundane immortality. There are no deeds
more permanent than those of Buddha, of Mohammed,
of Jesus. And innumerable lesser deeds of equal
validity have completed the substance of these mighty
frames. The deeds of the mystics constitute the hard
parts of history ; the rest has its day and passes.

The love of history has not usually been reckoned
among the virtues of the mystic. The mystic is pre-
cisely the timeless and unhistorical being, even in the
midst of his creations. It is no concern of the artist
that he produces to-day or to-morrow, for this company
or for that. I admit the paradox. The carelessness
of time is the chief evidence of the artist's historic
security. If he is a true creator he addresses history
itself, with all its accidents. Socrates does not write,
nor does Spinoza publish his chief work ; but each in
his own way cares sacredly for the viability of the link
between himself and the concrete future,

Ketreat from history is the mystic's temptation.
And he who dwells in the universal alone becomes
false ; the unhistorical mystic is a liar : he has hidden
himself from the truth which is only in the fact. But
the falsity of mysticism is the beginning of its end.

THE PROPHETIC CONSCIOUSNESS 513

The next swing of the alternation of mind brings the
scientist, who is the mystic confronting the fact with
his absolute. Objectivity of mind is the most germane
fruit of religion ; and science becomes possible only
through long discipline of worship. Man cannot at
first bear a perfect contact with nature, nor conceive a
wholly physical causality ; none of his early hardships
give him the sense of fact; his fancies stand between
him and the possibility of a fully physical experience.
It is only the developed spirit that can bear the fact in
its nakedness. It is only the modern mind that can
define causality. Truthfulness is a wholly modern
virtue, born with the Renaissance and its respect for
the objective event. And the Renaissance is the medi-
aeval mind turned upon nature ; it is worship turning to
discover the sacredness of history. The historical
virtues, truthfulness and economic integrity, are the
latest moral products of spiritual advance, the especial
deposits of the Christian temper in religion.

And indeed it is only the mystic who ought to be
historically moral ; for to him alone can the world as
it is, in its very particulars, be sacred. The unf riendlj
shapes of fortune are the chief occasions for faith; onljl
faith is right in exposing itself to them without reserve ;
and faith is but the love of God, the prophetic conscious-
ness, confronted by the particulars of history. It is
only the mystic, I say, who is wholly bound to history,
and therewith to truth and honor.

There is such a thing as losing one's soul : and that
is, rejecting one's call to prophesy. For if there be
any immortality beyond this present scheme of things,
it is not in abstraction therefrom : the destiny of our

514: THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

own deeds, great and small, is an integral part of what-
ever future there may be for us. To deserve to endure
is the only guarantee of enduring. I have no faith
in an intrinsic indestructibility of the substance of
consciousness. One life is given us ; another may be
acquired.1 Immortality, I venture to think, may be the
chief and total object of the prophetic consciousness.
But if so, it must be a consciousness of such command
of nature as he only has who can wholly accept nature
as it is ; of such superiority to the catastrophes of his-
tory as he only has who can unreservedly live out into
this present history, knowing it, even to its last hard
fact, as Ms sphere of divine control.

Professor 0. A. Bennett calls my attention to a
remark by Edmund G-osse in an essay on Malherbe
to the effect that in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries it was the fashion for all poets to claim im-
mortality. When prophecy becomes a convention, the
virtue has leaked out of it; but it was presumably
wme original virtue that inspired the imitators.

i See on this point Frederic Palmer, The Winning of Immortality.

CHAPTER XXXm

THE UNIFYING OF HISTORY

OUR historic existence with its immense contingen-
cies we take for the most part with a certain poetic
remoteness : we only half believe in it ; we hope well of
it — that is to say, we hope well of the luck that seems
to prevail there. We live still in a semi-savage dreami-
ness, incredulous of the distant contingency, incredulous
therefore of the present moment, veiled from the actual
conditions of action, circling at planetary distances about
our own practical center. The fanciful is too real to us,
the real too fanciful* The evil that is in this world, and
especially in this spirit of meaningless accident — the
luck which we hope will be for us good luck — this evil
does not rouse us : it benumbs us, rather, and confirms
our somnambulism. This is our ingrained irresponsi-
bility, our original sin.

It is the last fruit of religion to produce, or approxi-
mate, a prophetic consciousness, that is to say, a natural
historic consciousness, wholly wakened, literal, and real,
capable of seeing the divinity of its own present fact
and acting upon it. It is the work of faith to face the
bulk and detailed circumstance of nature, banish its
luck, remove its mountains. Religion must labor long,
but aims at last to bring about such a faith, literal,
prophetic, responsible.

But we are right in our incredulity, so long as

516 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

religion comes to us only as a psychological necessity.
The conditions for prophetic control of fortune lie
without as well as within, far out on the borders of the
universe. Science and the State, under the encourage-
ment of faith, may banish luck gradually to these
borders : but from them, luck streams back upon human
life — distributed, perhaps, in its incidence, yet none the
less menacing and vast. Unless the original sources of
history, the ultimate arrangements of natural facts, the
configurations of physical things which set the last limits
to the hopes of all living beings, are already subject to
some other control than our own, there is no such thing
as absolute certainty of historic action. I cannot hasten
the missile that has once left my hand ; every workman
must leave his work at last to a world that he can no
longer govern ; the whole race of prophets and world-
builders stands helpless in the presence of a wider agency
whose name is either Fate or Providence. Without the
cooperation of an environment not less than infinite,
the best prophet comes at last to zero — the worse because
of his concrete hopes. The mystic must give reason
for his dogma that there is no "realm of chance " ; that
beside the work of God which we have been tracing in
the individual mind, there is a supplementary work of
God in the world beyond the human will, — there at the
origins of the plot which all events work out. Thus
the theory of religion rests back upon cosmology and
the philosophy of a wider history for its final justification.

I cannot here follow out into this wider world the
question of the right of the religious consciousness in its
immediate practical assurance. But at least one principle

THE UNIFYING OF HISTORY 517

prevailing in that world is already in our hand, and I will
touch upon it in closing. So far as our own human
history is concerned — a small part, no doubt, of our total
environment — we can see that the religious will tends
to create the conditions for its own success. Note what
these conditions are.

It is in our human environment, as we said, that our
natural will-to-command finds its first successes: our
power extends from this center outward. Yet taking
the human world as a whole, it presents a problem to
prophetic ambition not less baffling than that of the
control of nature : in fact, these two problems are precise
counterparts of one another. Dealing with the social
environment has always the guidance and encouragement
of response, pro and con, which nature lacks. On the
other hand, dealing with nature has always this element
of satisfaction, that nature is a single order, persistent,
invariably faithful to its own principles whether against
us or for us. The obstacles to prophetic confidence in
dealing with the human world consist in the absence of
just these qualities. He who intends to accomplish
something permanent must appeal to an environment
that treasures and faithfully conserves values. The
fluid mass of free wills conserves nothing, holds itself
bound to nothing. A world which can promise to
conserve must itself be unitary and eternal: it must
have a principle of persistent identity and reliability
like that of nature. To introduce into this mass of free
individuals an order, unity, and inflexibility of purpose
like that of nature would indeed be something of a
miracle. Yet without this, the prophetic attitude is not
justified : this, as I see it, is precisely what the prophet

518 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

must require. He must find in the current of history
a unity corresponding to the unity of the physical
universe, or else he must create it. And what I want
to point out is that it is just such a conscious unification
of history that the religious will spontaneously tends
to bring about.

We can see that the type of power which we have called
prophetic, unlike that power which Nietzsche celebrates,
tends not to compete with and destroy the like power in
its neighbors, but rather to develop and to propagate it.
As laughter begets laughter, and courage courage,
passing from mind to mind and crystallizing a social
group or a social world upon its own principle, so does
the world-conquering temper of religion beget its like.
No human attitude is more socially contagious than that
of worship, except the practical attitude toward facts
which comes out of worship : namely, enthusiasm for
suffering, conscious superiority to hostile facts of what-
ever sort or magnitude, knowledge of their absolute
illusoriness, so far as they pretend finality, — in a word
the practical certitude of the prophet. When religion
has thus acquired a clear-sighted and thorough contemp-
tus mundi, religion begins to be potent within this same
world of facts: it was within the scope of the stoic to
become impregnable, but the religious spirit finds itself
more than impregnable, — irresistible. The prophetic
attitude begins at once to change facts, to make dif-
ferences, to do work ; and its first work is, as I say,
its social contagion : it begins to crystallize its environ-
ment, that is, to organize the social world upon its own
principle.

And if this temper is actually spread through the

THE UNIFYING OF HISTORY 619

social world (not rising and dying out like the wave of
laughter, but reaching the threshold of self -perpetuation),
something more has happened than the dissemination
of a type of will by 'social imitation' — namely, that
environment is created which this same type of will
requires. The human world has taken on a certain
unity of mind and purpose ; for whatever may be the
special field of action of any religious will, every such
will must desire that unification of the conscious world
as a necessary part of its own purpose. So far, all have
common cause. Every prophetic will is something of
an environment for every other ; as the group widens,
and pervades human life with its principle, it becomes,
as an environment, more adequate to its task, and may
reach complete adequacy.

We may conceive some such group as becoming fully
conscious of the nature and extent of this task ; and
adopting as its own special responsibility the extension
of its own unity, for the sake of making this same will
accessible to all men. It would thus make it, so to speak,
its own prophecy that prophetic will shall be possible;
that no human being shall be obliged to let his prophetic
impulses die for lack of that unity in the human world
which must justify them. This, I believe, is the essen-
tial purpose of the religious institution. It is this
purpose, as I conceive it, which brings religion to earth
in the form not simply of a system of truth, not simply
as a type of personal experience, but in the form which
religion everywhere takes, that of the positive historic
body with work to perform.

Positive religion in its primitive phases makes history
possible, cultivating what we might call the tribal and

520 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

national memory. In its more developed phases, it
tries to achieve a more general, non-political, but none
the less historic solidarity among men. It undertakes,
we may say, to do for the sporadic prophetic impulses
of men what the State does for their sporadic impulses
of justice and public power. Let me develop this idea
a little.

As I look over the circumstances of religious develop-
ment, I observe that there are four striking changes in
the religious consciousness which usually occur together:
as religion becomes ' redemptive' (that is, world-over-
coming in one way or another), it detaches itself from
the national life, it begins a universal propaganda, and
it refers itself and its adherents to some distinctive
historic object or person as the beginning of its temporal
undertaking (and so, as a special point of irruption of
the divine into history). Thus Islam points to its shrine
and its sacred book ; the Buddhist convert must take
refuge in the Buddha, as well as in the doctrine and the
order ; Christianity asks men to regard its founder as
the unique way to God. How are we to understand
this remarkable concurrence of characteristics at this
stage of development ?

It is the analogy of the State which best helps me to
understand what these things mean. The political
organization affords to the individuals under it what
Bagehot well describes as a " calculable future." In
the State I have some prospect of a tangible immortality,
I acquire property that may affect in one way or another
my children's children. I promote laws, perhaps, that
influence more or less all lives to come within the scope

THE UNIFYING OF HISTORY 521

of that government. I can do my small part anywhere
in art or industry or science with a sense of worth;
because the State is there to give permanence to
the growing treasures of one generation after another.
The State lends to my deeds its own permanence,
so far as these deeds are legitimate and within its own
province.

In the same way the religious institution (I am
speaking now of the ideal, as reflection shows it to me,
certainly not of the entire body of instituted religion
as it now is) — the religious institution seems to exist
to lend its own permanence and immortality to the deeper
and wider prophetic purposes of men. In severing its
fortunes from those of the State, it assures to the
individual his right to live and take part in an infinite
history, though outside all States, and in spite of the
defects of all earthly States. It stands between the
creative individual will and that unordered, or unstably
ordered, human social mass, before whose free mobility
and passion that will is indeed in a hopeless plight.

Religion defies the clash and decay of the political
attempts of men, whose mission in their own sphere is
similar; but it is historic religion which chiefly renders
those political attempts hopeful. Religion from primi-
tive times the protector of the stranger, the market-place,
the truce, is the forerunner of international law ; because
it alone can create the international spirit, the inter-
national obligation; it alone can permanently sustain
and ensure that spirit.1

1 By such super-nationalism in religion, national individuality is not
obscured, but rather promoted* We require a world-religion just because
we do not require, nor wish, a world state.

522 THE FBUITS OF KELIGION

It is this function, as I think, which the greater
religions have more or less clearly perceived. They
propose to bring into human affairs that most general
unity, not interfering with nor displacing any more
special undertaking, without which no such special
undertaking — whether of art, or of science, or of law —
is worth while, being without promise of permanence.

We customarily think of the religious institution as
a way of arranging for the social side of worship.
Worship is imperfect unless when I worship, I am joining
the race in worship.1 Instituted religion has accordingly
made worship public ; at its best, it does much to join
the minds of all sorts and conditions of men in worship,
of all present human worshippers, and with those of
the past and of the future. Further, we think of the
institution as an educating body, or as propagating the
religious type of mind by that social imitation we were
speaking of. But we usually fail, as I think, to see
what the institution does to justify that type of mind ;
namely, that it brings to the individual soul not only its
moral ideal, its psychological norm, but also the kind of
world wherein such a mind can alone rightly assert itself.
It is a unified and responsible world, one which cares
for the individual in his concrete character, and will
bear out his rightful will to endure, — a human world
which religion itself has made.

It is a sign of the good faith of the institution that

1 We have regarded worship in its mystical aspect, as a solitary
adventure of the soul : but we have also noted from time to time that
before the mystic may make his lonely flight to God, he must assert as
fully as possible his unity with his human spiritual context. Unity with
the Absolute becomes significant in proportion as the worshipper is first
one with the spirit of God as already established in the world.

THE UNIFYING OF HISTORY 523

it brings to the individual, who seeks assurance of his
own absolute worth, its assertion of its own power and
permanence- It encourages him to prophesy, only in
so far as it itself is based on prophecy. It asserts its
own universal scope and indestructibility — the gates
of hell shall not prevail against it. If this is a true
assertion, the individual may always knit his prophetic
action to that. The attitude which as a solitary being
he could not rightfully assume is made possible to him
by this external agency which is throwing over all
history its most general unity, bringing men everywhere
to a singleness of mind and a singleness of purpose.
Through that agency, and not otherwise, he may win,
in the language of religion, his (historic) salvation, the
forgiveness of his ingrained sin.

In our current consciousness, we feel little need of
these external assurances, nor of the institution which
offers them. The sense of sin grows foreign to us : the
suggestion that we any longer require what our fathers
called salvation strikes with a note of unreality. We
feel ourselves morally secure; and historically, — as
secure as need be. But when beneath this over-social-
ized surface of consciousness we penetrate to the actual
basis of such certainties as we have, our self-respect,
our belief in human worth, our faith in the soul's
stability through all catastrophes of physical nature,
and in the integrity of history — this history of ours
— forever, we must recognize there a mass of actual
deed, once for all accomplished under the assurances of
historic religion. A system of deed, I might rather
say, organized about a prophetic purpose once planted

524 THE FRUITS OF RELIGION

in history and now perpetually reproducing itself all
around us.

The work of positive religion is largely silent ; like
the work of positive law, it is as great in what it
prevents as in what it noisily accomplishes — perhaps
greater. But the work is there, and if we are just we
shall acknowledge it. Our confidences with regard to
history must be built in history as well as in universal
thought, — in both of these, welded together. Unless
we can discern at its silent work in human affairs this
power, self-consciously eternal, actively communicating
its own scope to the feeble deeds, the painful acquire-
ments, the values, the loves and hopes of men, we
have no right to such faith as we habitually assume.
And without such faith there is for us no valid religion.

EXPLANATORY NOTES AND ESSAYS

NOTE ON THE SUBCONSCIOUS

IT is well to emphasize the fact that subconsciousness is not
an endowment but an incidental acquisition, due to strain
of voluntary attention. It is a by-product of determinedly
self-conscious life. No infant has a subconsciousness: no
adult is without one.

Our subconsciousness at any time may be roughly
described as that remainder of consciousness which persists
outside the sphere to which in our various practical efforts we
deliberately narrow our interest. And this remainder has two
divisions which must be sharply distinguished in thought,
though in fact they blend into one another.

We may define these two divisions by their relation to the
voluntarily conscious self : the first is allied with it, the sec-
ond is more or less hostile to it, or critical of it. The former
part, the allied subconscious, is called subconscious chiefly be-
cause it is not being thought of, though it is being thought
with. It contains the instincts that we inherit and the habits
we form ; also the memories we store, and all the system of
ideas with which we do our apperceiving. It contains the
habits of appreciation we build up, and the habits of decision
— in short our * character.' It is an active organ in all expe-
rience, and can at any time become an object of reflective
scrutiny. Though many an element of memory, of attitude,
of my controlling ideas and deeper instincts, may evade
the grasp of my pointed attention at any moment, there is
nothing here that is essentially inaccessible, nothing that may
not become part of the focus of consciousness. It is not
« split-off' from the central stream of attention: its objects

528 THE SUBCONSCIOUS

are the same objects, its world is the same world, with that
of the artificial or central self.1

The other aspect of subconsciousness, the critical, is the
part to which the name is more properly applied. It is a
consciousness of objects which we, the artificial person, have
chosen not to be conscious of. It is the unchosen or repressed,
marginal life of the mind, maintaining an existence of protest,
like a sort of bad conscience. What our artificial efforts
exclude from notice is not utterly excluded; we are not so free
as we seem in the self we make. It is impossible to condemn
to oblivion any small voice in us without in some measure
being conscious of that voice ; and especially if we condemn
on less than full conviction we cannot help being aware that
our condemnation is hasty, and this element of our conscious-
ness remains in communication with the excluded strand, and
keeps it alive, as it were surreptitiously.

Thus it is that old habits of observation continue to do
their work without separate urging. Things which I have
once noticed, or collected, or otherwise valued, I continue sub-
consciously to take notice of, though I may have outgrown the
interest, or may have become ashamed of it. There is an
extraordinary cunning and minuteness about this aspect of
subconsciousness. It is the watch-dog of the mind. It may take
note of time, observe faces, remember the numbers on houses
or bank-bills, the names of streets, the turns of stairs, passing
shadows, flitting expressions of the eye and voice : it is faith-
ful, as the photographic plate is faithful, to slighter impres-
sions than the artificial self can discriminate. For doubtless
the limits of voluntary interest have reduced the fulness of
the reports which our senses may make to the artificial self.
Our eyes and ears are capable of far more than we can now
get from them ; the remainder, up to the limit of their sensi-
tivity, may still be kept in a subconscious record. But again

1 Since subconsciousness, as I believe, is a division within consciousness,
the proper contrast is between the subconscious and the artificial self , not
between the subconscious and the conscious. • *

THE SUBCONSCIOUS 529

we must say that this faithful and relatively mechanical
observer in us takes note of nothing that has not at some
previous time been important to the self-conscious mind,
whether of the individual or his ancestors. Its world, though
supplementary, is still the same world as that of the artifi-
cial self.1

* There is in reality, as I have said, no sharp line between the « allied
subconsciousness ' and the ' critical subconsciousness ' : whether any given
experience, noted by these persistent habits of observation, becomes criti-
cal, or merges itself with the allied ' apperceivmg mass,' is a question
chiefly of the kind of exclusion which relegates that experience to sub-
consciousness. It may be an exclusion of antipathy ; it may be an exclu-
sion of simple limitation of interest (in which case, the subconscious crit-
icism amounts only to this, that * These things also ought to be taken
into account ') : or again, it may be an almost wholly passive exclusion.
Professor Angier, in commenting upon this note, makes this distinction
very clear and graphic. He writes : —

" As I take it, many of the occurrences of life which apparently do
not impress explicit consciousness at all, toward which at any given time
we react in no accepting or repressing way whatever, slide into the sub-
conscious where they find congenial connections and become part of the
reservoir of what you call the * allied subconsciousness.' In traveling, for
instance, I imagine that many of the scenes through which we go, which
never enter the focal point of consciousness, nevertheless contribute richly
to the final attitude with which our travels leave us; and later, in recalling
these travels, they furnish a background for our memory image or for
onr conversation.

" Is there not a difference between those things which we have " chosen
not to be conscious of," i.e., repressed, and those things which have simply
not entered the field of explicit choice at all ? This seems to be a real
distinction. Those things which do not enter the field of choice, but
nevertheless casually make their impression on the subconscious, do not
necessarily, perhaps not at all, constitute part of the critical subconscious-
ness. To my mind it is only those things to which we are either instinc-
tively or through deliberation averse that become our subconscious moni-
tor and critic.

" It seems to me that we meet two types of personality based on this
distinction: one, the genial, tolerant man who impresses us as reeking with
a rich and friendly co-consciousness which gives subtle color and tone
to all his sayings and doings; and the other one, whose helping co-con-
sciousness is meager, but whose critical or antagonistic co-consciousness
is rick"

530 THE SUBCONSCIOUS

This protesting part of subconsciousness has great varia-
tions in its volume and strength as compared with the self,
conscious stream running along beside it. It has its periods
of fulness and of emptiness; it has its own methods of
relief, finding its way back to the central self. We may
describe briefly the circumstances that fill it up ; and then
these methods of relief.

1. Strenuousness. Clearly, whatever tightens the strain
of conscious attention will increase the burden of the subcon-
scious. The natural materialism of determined action; the
stern selection for world-building purposes of fact having a
specified degree of solidity and resistance ; these make quick
work of all trailing " clouds of glory/' and relegate them to
the subconscious where they maintain a ghostly existence.
What men call sentiment has to spend much of its life in this
Coventry: it has little chance while "business is business"
— and probably ought to have little chance.

Insistent * reasonableness,' i.e., strident logical pose where
ideas are far in advance of possible idea-connections, richly
contributes to the subconscious, and correspondingly impov-
erishes the artificial self. Note too that it is the nature of
reasonableness of this sort to seem to itself right and self-
sufficient: the circle of ideas that pass censorship becomes
fixed ; they make themselves a closed group. The voice of the
excluded margin is timid, unarmed, merely advisory, at a
political disadvantage. It is easy for the focus to become
tyrannical, to refuse due representation to the counsels of the
subconscious; so that a parallel stream of judgment which
might silently mingle with and modify the course of decision
is cleanly excluded and put into hostility. Thus the focal
center of life hardens, polishes its surface, and tends to
perpetuate its own quality.

Severe mental concentration produces apparent oblivion to
external happenings ; but in reality a division of mind which
adds to the subconscious. If long continued, certain segments

THE SUBCONSCIOUS 531

of memory and of the technique of common living maybe split
off, temporarily or permanently.

Moral and religious strenuosity has the same result, and
particularly when one wages war against an entire aspect or
conception of oneself. Dr. Prince's Miss Beauchamp shows
very well a type of zeal which must result in highly charged
subconsciousiiess. As a child " her mother exhibited a great
dislike to her. . . „ On the other hand she herself idealized
her mother, bestowing upon her almost morbid affection : and
believing that her mother's lack of affection was due to her
own imperfections, she gave herself up to introspection, and
concluded that if she could only purify herself and make
herself worthy, her mother's affection would be given her." l
As she comes under Dr. Prince's observation u she is possessed
of a conscientiousness which at times has proved embarrassing
to her friends. It is carried sometimes to a degree that may
be characterized as morbid. For instance, while in college
she was the recipient of a scholarship; consequently she
considered it her duty, in return for this benefit, so diligently
to apply herself to her studies that it was impossible for
teacher or physician to enforce sufficient recreation, or even
the rest and hygienic measures which were absolutely neces-
sary to keep what little health she had." Further fragments
from Dr. Prince's notes : " morbid pride . . . refinement of
thought and feeling beyond the ordinary » . „ she took
everything intensely . . . mentally and morally stubborn."
The depth and coherence of Miss Beauchamp's subconscious
life must be attributed very largely to this extraordinary will
together with the equally extraordinary definition of its own
problem.

This is not to condemn the strenuous life ; on the contrary,
only through strenuous attention can the standard of definition
and factuahiess be set to which it is the aim of all idea to
conform; I only point out the inevitable incident of that
strain. Any action at all, any dealing with things, is a strain
1 Morton Prince. The Dissociation of a Personality, ch. ii.

532 THE SUBCONSCIOUS

outward, involves some artificial limitation of judgment, some
over-influence of physical standards, and will require compen-
sation. The subconscious is simply tlie internal register of
the compensation required, and will obviously increase in
fulness with the degree of free-will put behind the action.

2. Suppression of critical comment. There are various
ways and various motives by which our spontaneous criticism
of people and things gets huddled out of sight, and may be so
effectively suppressed as to become subconscious. Thus we
incline to suppress self-criticism ; the self of us which " knows
better" when we want to depart from common sense or
common duly, the self to which our moral gadflies appeal when
they assume that every man knows what is right, and come
toward us rather with indignation than with persuasion ; the
self which we call conscience or mother wit; this self is
capable of being suppressed — that is to say, so systematically
hushed that it learns its place and ceases to interfere. In
such cases, our bad conscience does literally take up its abode
in subconsciousness. We suppress also criticisms of others,
of institutions, opinions, etc. ; we choke down dislikes, wrongs,
fears, doubts, scruples, on the theory of our artificial self when
it holds that these negative feelings ought not to exist.
Theoretical policy, especially social policy, must in the main
be affirmative ; succeeding policy must be blind to minor hin-
drances ; health must ignore disease : and these fair resolves
run much danger of building up a critical subconsciousness, pro-
ducing a bland and false personality. One is parted from the
truth of his own aversions. One begins a regime of duplicity,
and may end by losing all personal grit ancl valency. An
especial case of this suppression is that of the knowledge
of guilt of a past act which I regard as uuconf essable :
it may be a trivial matter; or it may be a criminal record, a
character overcome and hidden from sight ; or it may be no
moral thing at all, but a physical or mental peculiarity, or a
defect in one's pedigree or origin which, as one thinks, simply
must not be known. Suppressions of this sort contribute

THE SUBCONSCIOUS 533

richly to subconsciousness, and incidentally to the clinic of
the psychiatrist.

3. Organic growth. The assumption that the artificial
self is sufficient unto itself makes difficult the entrance of new
ideas into consciousness, especially of new attitudes toward life
as a whole such as growth brings. Whatever is new in the
field of idea is still weaker, as against the central self, than
the usual marginal idea; for the most part these incipient
developments can gain recognition only through the channels
of dream, imagination ; they so far gain the conscious ear as to
call the mind away from actualities, from time to time, to a
world of vague but alluring phantasms which turn into nothing
real. Hence it is that adolescence, which is peculiarly a time
of theory-grasping as well as of growth, is subject to subcon-
scious accumulations and to dreams, and so to more or less
disturbing processes of relief. On the other hand, these new
ideas have this advantage over other types of subconscious
burden that they are waxing in force rather than waning, and
are destined at some time or other to find their way to the
center.

The rejoining of the artificial self with the subconscious
self is an event for which nature has not failed to provide
certain instinctive methods. For each of these ways of accu-
mulating there is a way of discharging : I think it is true
that all of the major rhythms of conscious life involve some
rise and fall in the subconscious pressure. I wish to point
out that all of these methods of relief involve finding an
object which is common to the conscious and the sub-conscious
self.

1. For stremiousness the natural remedy is a general low-
ering of activity, roposo. Wherever the strains of artificiality
and attention can be released, as in privacy and the ease of*
friendly intercourse, the subconscious begins to find its way
back to the focus. This type of relief reaches its natural end
in sleep. In sleep, voluntary attention is abolished ; the mind

534 THE SUBCONSCIOUS

is acting on no theory of the good, and no theory of itself.
But in sleep it cannot be said that consciousness is abolished ;
it is rather the case that consciousness has attached itself to
an object which is common to all interests, conscious and sub-
conscious, namely, the individual self. And by relating them-
selves to that object, without interference from the theoret-
ical will, the various strands of mental life tend to resume
their natural relations to each other.

2. For suppression of comment the natural remedy is a
generally heightened activity, excitement, orgy, passion.1
Passion might almost be defined as a rapid release of subcon-
scious strain under heightened attention. It occurs when some
object in the conscious field arouses an idea belonging to that
strand of the allied subconsciousness which is keeping this
part of the critical subconsciousness alive. We commonly
observe that in anger, long suppressed comment finds its way
to the surface : criticisms which one had resolved never to
utter come to the fore and join in the summary destructive
flux. More accurately speaking, anger is the flood itself,
the rapid synthesis of the disowned ideas with the idea which
has here found its object. But any agitation tends to enlist
wider and wider areas of mental resource, and so to bring
subconsciousness into working relations again with the artifi-
cial self, just as by aid of heat or solution chemical unions
may take place, and equilibria be established, which other-
wise would remain indefinitely in posse. In excitement, one
passion makes opportunity for another ; and orgy may end,
not only in general exhaustion, but also in the general harmony
and unity of the entire creature. Thus, amusement and
recreation do their part in relieving subconscious pressure.

3. What organic growth contributes to subconsciousness is
a kind of suppressed comment ; and its natural relief is also
a kind of passion. This passion occurs when the dreams, in

1 There is, of course, no strict one-to-one correspondence between
these types of relief and the types of accumulation of strain. Thns
suppressed comment may also be relieved by repose, or by change*

THE SUBCONSCIOUS 535

which the growing motive had been finding vague expres-
sion, 'come real'; i.e., when in the waking world an object
appears which at the same time recalls and satisfies those
groping ideas. This, of course, is what happens in * falling
in love.'

4. But beside these instinctive methods of relief there is
another, namely that of deliberate reflection. Experience in
this matter, as in all matters, brings about the possibility of
conscious control of the process of reuniting the disjoined
fragments of selfhood. One learns to recognize in himself
the malaise of subconscious pressure, and to turn upon him-
self with the demand, " Well, what is the matter with me."
Such a person is delivered from the more drastic and physi-
ological upheavals, just so far as his power of self-analysis
reaches. If he can find the idea which commands both the
conscious and the subconscious, he can do intentionally what
nature does instinctively. Thus, confession and seltconfes*
sion relieve the strain of suppressed comment, and in such wise
that one knows what has happened to him — in so far, with
better result than by the way of passion. The deliberate
practice of sincerity and prizing of the e natural' self are
habits which to some extent may prevent the accumulation
of rebellious residues. Resolute facing of the fear or the
doubt which dogs one's peace; consciously planned occa-
sions for meeting and removing grounds of injury or dislike:
in all these ways, and in many others, consciousness holds
in its own power the methods of reunion with the critical
subconsciousneas.

But there is no such thing as a complete displacement of
nature by art in this matter: the squarely reflective restora-
tion of selfhood reaches but little way. It is but a process of
seeking, or as we might say, of prayer ; it cannot surely com-
mand the reconciling idea ; and even so, it does not so much
displace the natural methods of repose, excitement, and love
as it does meet these half way, and recognize their place in
the conscious system of life.

536 THE SUBCONSCIOUS

It must have become evident that the subconscious or " sub-
liminal self " is only another name for that natural self of which
we have been speaking ; the self which in effort we lose, and
tend to harden a superficial crust against. Whatever releases
subconscious ideas into central consciousness does so far relieve
spiritual fatigue ; and vice versa, whatever relieves this fatigue
does at the same time rejoin these two partially divided aspects
of conscious life. It will therefore be possible — though of
no great advantage — to express the meaning of worship in
term of this relation between subconsciousness and the rest
of consciousness.

Characteristic of worship is the necessary place in it of the
method of deliberate reflection ; this constitutes the active part
of worship, or prayer. And in the passive side of worship,
the mystic experience itself, we find qualities which resemble
those of all the * natural ' modes of recovery, — rest, excitement
and love : worship is a natural synthesis of all of these ; the
elevation of the mystic is a state at once of passion and of peace.
This might be inferred apriori from the fact that the idea of
God is one to which no item of consciousness, whether split
off or not, can get out of relation ; it is an idea which
belongs permanently to that self which stands prior to the
divergence between the artificial and the subconscious.

The religious ecstasy or orgy is a product of religious spe-
cialization. That is to say, worship ideally speaking is capable
of fulfilling all the functions of the other means of re-integra-
ting selfhood, whether of love, or of amusemont, or of sleep
itself (as witness the exploits in comparative sleeplessness
of Madame Guyon, of Philip of Alcantara, and of many
another) : and if one must, or will, confine himself to this one
method of spiritual recovery, mystic ecstasy is quite normal.
We avoid it, and on the whole prefer to avoid it, by a differ-
entiation of worship in which our mystic experience is diffused
among the several more instinctive rhythms. I do not doubt
that the distrust shown by certain of the stricter sects toward
amusements, especially toward dance and the theater, fe iue

THE SUBCONSCIOUS 537

not so much to the alleged inherent sinfulness, o£ these amuse-
ments, as to the circumstance that they actually substitute for,
and so diminish the intensity of, the specifically religious mys-
ticism. It is a clear modern instance of the 'jealous God';
and this jealousy is justified in so far as pleasure is disposed to
ignore its dependence upon the whole-idea for existence.

The language of subconsciousness need not misrepresent the
facts of religious experience. With the descriptive skill of
James or of Pratt it conveys much truth which could hardly
otherwise be so effectively expressed. But it almost inevit-
ably misleads. For it hardly fails to suggest, first, a division
that does not exist ; and second, a superhuman resource which
is different from the resource of our simple waking selves.

As to the first point, we must insist on the fact that there
is no subconsciousness which is out of consciousness. The

* allied subconsciousness' is an organ of consciousness ; and the

* critical subconsciousness' is present to the 'allied subconscious-
ness ' in the same way that the artificial self is present. The

* allied subconsciousness' is simply the comprehensive self
whose object is c the whole.' After many years of observation,
Janet finds himself doubting whether even in hysterical patients
there may not be a self which envisages both the normal and
the dissociated segments of consciousness. He thus states his
own present questionings: "Does not the hysteric herself
possess a sort of insane belief which makes her relinquish
certain phenomena ? Up to what point is she sincere in her
declarations of ignorance ? Does she not to a certain extent
deceive herself ?" etc.1 And what may hold good in such
abnormal deepening of the cleft between the artificial self and
subconsciousness, I cannot doubt to be true of our normal
relation to subconsciousness — namely, that we are conscious
of our * subconsciousness' all the time. The subconscious is
not something which, we should think of as a distinct gland of
psychical life, accumulating its own stores and occasionally

1 Subconscious Phenomena! p. 66.

538 THE SUBCONSCIOUS

overflowing into the central self. The subconscious is the
deposit of our own logical sense, our own value-consciousness
and moral judgment, our own metaphysical instinct, in short, of
our own whole-idea, in its unceasing criticism upon the judg-
ments of our partial, strenuous, and artificial self. It con*
tains the opposite, or antithesis, which our artificial self at any
moment needs to justify it and make it completely true ; it
contains, therefore, the next turn in the dialectic of experience:
— all of Hegel's categories may be conceived to spring up in
order out of subconsciousness.

And this may serve to correct also the second misconception
which the language of subconsciousness arouses, namely, that we
have here a mysterious and superhuman faculty of knowledge.
Not that it leads us to think too highly of our capacities.
That reflection of von Hartmann's is hardly too sanguine,
however absurdly it is expressed: "Let us not despair at
having a mind so practical and so lowly, so unpoetical and so
little spiritual; there is within the innermost sanctuary of
each of us a marvelous something of which we are uncon-
scious, which dreams and prays while we labor to earn our
daily bread." * Well, so there is ; only, we are not uncon-
scious of it. Subconsciousness has indeed infinite resources,
but they are cwr resources — they are the resources of the
infinite idea such as we in our normal waking capacity do
rightfully possess, and such as we shall in time learn to
command*

1 Quoted by Hart, Subconscious Phenomena, p. 106.

II

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN IDEA AND VALUE
UNDERSTOOD THROUGH BIOLOGY.1

ris a besetting fault of our constructive thinking to over-
estimate the load which a distinction will carry. We
prove that conscience is uniquely different from the calculus
of values and think we have saved ethics. We discover that
theoretical judgments and judgments of appreciation are fairly
independent, and hasten to found philosophies of religion upon
the breach. With these and other dichotomies we renew
the experience that unless we have something more than a
difference, what we accomplish is simply to insulate our ethics
and onr religion. What tempts us repeatedly into this dead
comer is, I believe, the conviction that mind must be studied
on its own ground : whereas the truth is that regarded thus
intimately and ideally the objects of our inner experience
tend to fall into just these fruitless disparities.3 In my own

1 From an article published in Psychological Bulletin, Vol. vf No. 5
(May 15, 1008).

2 The more contemporary psychology exerts itself to be purely experi-
ential, th« mow it Jhuls itself busied in listing the * irreducible ' elements
of the mind. This is true particularly of German psychology where good
judgment is less likely to interfere with consistency of method. It
might save some trouble to observe that all aspects of the mind as pure ex-
perience are irreducible. Pleasure is pleasure ; Bcgrilf is Begriff ; reason
is reason; nothing is identical with anything else — not even with the
aggregate of its elements ; everything is simple and unique. It is well
to note this truth, — to insist on it is to spin on our boot-heels. An ir-
reducible is an object of which we can only say that it is what it is ; of
this material no science can be made. The tendency which isolates these
objects has something idealistic about it, perhaps ; but since it has no-
thing but the * given* to off or, it is necessarily dogmatic and exclamatory.
Only a genuine idealism can afford to be thoroughly materialistic in its
first explanations*

640 IDEA AND VALUE

attempts to gain relief from such situations I have found
myself moving, more or less clearly, in the direction of phys-
ical theory.

I have come to believe that there is a certain inevitable
logic in this. Our inner experiences, our oughts, our happi-
nesses, our values, even our pleasures among themselves, must as
objects of thought remain miscellaneous furniture, each turning
its back to the other in default of common understanding,
unless we can bring some finely indifferent unit of order and
comparison into them. The first business of all explanation
is to express a thing in terms of what it is not — an event in
terms of its cause, truth in terms of process, sensation in
terms of motion. Other things equal, the more alien in nature
the terms in which a thing is expressed the more successful
the explanation: the thing has its roots in the utmost corners
of reality — the demonstration is complete.1 Now nothing is
so admirable in its categorical indifference to the concerns of
the spirit as is physical nature. It has no member either in
the psychical movement or influenced by it. It is a seamless
garment of interweaving threads ; it is what the mathemati-
cian calls, in a word, a closed group, and the physicist, a con-
servative system. This complete conceptual independence it
is which chiefly qualifies it for serving as a terminus of explana-
tions for the peculiarities of spirit. Its alien quality (once it
is admitted to be a part of the same world with spirit) insures
that no aspect of consciousness will be unrepresented in the
physical system ; there will be nothing even in the relation of
1 The difficulty always is to see that such explanations explain. To
explain a thing by what it is not — that is to explain one mystery by
another. But is there nothing illuminating about that ? Tho company
which miseries are said to love lightens them ; mysteries love company
also, and for a similar reason. If we are satisfied to look no longer for
the supports of the earth because a group of unsupported planets can be
self-supporting we must be prepared to recognize similar relations among
facts. Every datum, taken alone, is dark, just because it is ultimate.
This stranding upon ' data ' is empiricism's weak spot, and its opportunity.
The thing that relieves data of darkness is, not more data exactly, but the
group-form into which data assemble themselves.

IDEA AND VALUE 641

consciousness to its world of objects and to other subjects
which is not shown in its field by wnie exact metaphor. That
is to say, — the elements of consciousness which on their own
separate ground are mutually repellent, find themselves mir-
rored in a homogeneous world no part of which can get out of
relation to any other, and from which, therefore, if we have the
key to the metaphor, those relations can be read and understood.

But this logical hint is enforced by a more substantial con-
sideration. It is reasonable to suppose that the answer to any
question will be found in the context of the phenomenon that
calls forth the question. There are good grounds for think-
ing that whatever plurality the mind shows, whatever temporal
movement and flux, is due to its entanglement in nature ; or,
to read the same relation from the other end, nature may be
the temporal and plural life of the mind. So of each several
aspect of the mind. Conscience, for instance, has no variety, no
application, no career, except for its commerce with our ' empiri-
cal' instincts and desires ; and desire, in turn, has no variety
nor development, except in the toils of a differentiating organ-
ism. Very probably, also, conscience splits off from desire
or desire from conscience on some rock of nature. Hence
without any assumption as to which of the two, nature or
mind, is the prime mover in this differentiating process, we
should naturally look for our principles of synthesis in that
same region of things which reveals tlie cleavages. Genetic
surveys have always the advantage of showing the emergence
of the thing in its * natural' relations — in the case of con-
science, for instance, it will be found in the company of those
desires and impulses with which it is destined to concern
itself as regulator. Nature can give no sign of conscience
except in the midst of its business. We have not first to
deduce the thing and then its application ; but if we find it at
all, we shall find the application first and the thing in the
heart of the application.

Now to decipher the physical substratum of mind, what we
most need is a distinction of categories. Not every aspect of

542 IDEA AND VALUE

consciousness is presented in the physical context by a separate
organ or process ; we must be ready to appeal to the higher
physical categories, the configurations of organs and processes,
accelerations of processes, and other differentials and modifi-
cations of energy. What nature shows us is not simply a
metaphor of consciousness (and hardly that — for its language
is all but literal), but it shows us a, finished anrrfysis of
consciousness. We know that whereas in itself pleasure is
simple, conscience is simple, and nature is simple, the attempt to
express one in terms of another brings out the subtleties of eiieh ;
and we shall not expect to find every unitary mental state
marked out in the body by tangibly colligated physiological
phenomena. We should be guided much more truly by the
principle ft&i psychical categories are comjilemc.ntary to physi-
cal categories. The first aspect of a psychical one will be a
physical many ; this physical many will have its physical unity
also, but that unity will not be in the same class of objects
with the many — will be found in physical functions \\hieh
are the more derivative in proportion as the psychical category
is more substantial. The unity of the 4 self * may thus be the
last thing for which the simple physical expression is found
(no pineal body among other bodies), though that simple
expression necessarily exists. The processes which belong to a
self are naturally more widely dispersed and more various than
those which belong to such imperfect and fragmentary unities
within a self as ' an experience,9 ' an idea,' * a pleasure,' etc. In
the interpretation of the freedom of consciousness we have a
clear case of the complementary nature of physical and psychi-
cal categories. The freedom and initiative of consciousness is
represented in nature by the obedient regularity, sometimes
called the necessity, of physical sequence. This is the only basis
upon which the relation of the free spirit to nature can be made
intelligible. In a machine whose parts have any slack or lost
motion the eye will discover the origin of pushes and pulls by
the direction of the slack. But in a machine all of whose con-
nections are perfect, so that there is not even infinitesimal slack

IDEA AND VALUE 543

in any part, it is impossible for observation to discover whether
the wheel is pulling the piston or the piston pushing the wheel.
Nature as a mechanism certainly offers no visible suggestion as
to the seat of its original impulses ; it simply goes its perfect
way ; and this alone it is which enables me to accept unreservedly
the testimony of consciousness that itself is the active and origi-
nal thing in the world, all else being ultimately passive. With
this understanding the chief difficulty in all biological accounts
of conscience is relieved — how, namely, out of natural law,
that is, out of absolute obedience, can come the dictator. It is
just because nature is the region of perfect obedience that the
dictator has to fc come out.5 In all strictness, dictatorship is
simply the permanent outside of nature ; and nature gives birth
to conscience as it were, by way of confession. What we see in
nature is the gradual perfection of the receiving organ, so that
freedom acquires growing significance as life moves on ; but
some receiving organ is always there, the regular is the contin-
uous signature of the free. We have therefore no separate
place to make in our account of value or conscience for free-
dom, since it is completely expressed in the character which
makes nature nature.

The term 6 idea ' will play the fundamental r61e in the
theory I have to propose, and it will be desirable to sketch its
physical interpretation before attempting the farther ques-
tion of the nature of value-experience. I shall attempt in the
end to show, through these physical expressions, that values
and conscience are functions in the life of c ideas,' and to
point out definitely, in the same language, what these functions
are. Our disjointed world of facts, appreciations, and duties,
may then be seen in some intelligible shape and connection on
a basis other than metaphysical, though at every point the
shapes of nature are but the intaglio of the spirit.

I. THE BIOLOGICAL EQUIVALENT OF

If our interpretation of freedom is valid, the fact that any
given physiological apparatus works 'mechanically' creates

544 IDEA AND VALUE

no presumption that it is unaccompanied by consciousness.
Consciousness is not introduced into the biological series at
the point where mechanism fails to meet the needs of adjust-
ment, because there is no such point. Hence * instincts,
however truly explained as congeries of simple automatisms of
tropic character, may at the same time represent some element
of consciousness. Such an element would necessarily be a
* universal' or general idea; for the instinct is related not to
individual objects, but to a type or class of objects, in such
wise that whatever object affords the proper stimulus releases
the appropriate action. To consciousness the stimulus would
appear not as c this individual object ' but rather as * a specimen
of this kind of thing ' toward which such and such a line of
action is desirable.

The repetition of the stimulus would present to conscious-
ness < another specimen of the same type,' and the similarity
of response might connect itself for that consciousness with
some quality common to the two particular objects ; but we
who look on can see that the identity of the idea lies not
primarily in any objective characters of the two experiences,
but rather in something which the organism carries around
with it, and which exists when there are no ' experiences 9 to
set off its train of behavior. I wish to show not only that there
is a biological equivalent for the permanent identity (some-
times called the ' timelessness ') of the idea, and for the native
difference between an idea and ' an experience,' but also to
show that the idea has a more continuous presence in conscious-
ness than the experiences in which it is subsumed from time
to time. An idea is in fact never absent from consciousness ;
the prevalent belief that it vanishes and reappears is a con-
fusion between the idea and the experience. Recognitions of
objects are intermittent ; but our ideas, it should be evident,
are not what we think o/J they are what we think with. Now
whatever else the unity of a consciousness may mean, it also
means that there is no isolated action of ideas, but that I
think with all of them at once in each moment, though the

IDEA AND VALUE 545

* bearing' of any given idea upon any given experience may
be very remote.

But beside the ideas that correspond to instincts, that is, to
the various modes of regular, quasi-official dealing with objects,
there is a set of ideas of a different sort, which I may call the
field-ideas, such as the idea of extension, or of the physical
continuum, or of a particular friendship, or that important
symbolic idea 'the whole of things.' These do not correspond
to any outlinable instincts ; their biological expression must
be sought elsewhere. But inasmuch as the field-ideas develop
in close concomitance with the development of the instincts, the
nature of the biological expression may appear by considering
the interaction of instinct-ideas in the course of evolution.

The evolution of ideas in its most general biological char-
acter may be summarized as a matter of the bala?icing of in-
stincts — that is, of the emergence of * secondaiy ' or counter-
instincts, which act together with the ' primary ' instincts as
more general instincts than either alone. Such a pair will be
represented in consciousness by a more general idea. Now we
have to note that every time one instinct has been balanced
by another, consciousness has acquired not only a new type
or class of objects, but also an idea of much greater scope
than that corresponding to either of the two instincts separ-
ately. Just as my present impulse cannot be checked by the
suggestion of something future without making me aware not
merely of the two points in time, but more or less dimly of
the stretch of time between ; so the generalized habit of modify-
ing the present impulse by the consideration of future contin-
gencies cannot be established without making the idea of the
time-field a correspondingly firm element of my conscious
vista. So in proportion as I learn to modify my reflex upon
what is here by the suggestion of what is not here, the idea
of space becomes a mastered range of mental vision. The
logic of the process is this ; that whenever an x meets its non-05,
x having been my largest class, the two can coexist in the same
mind only as parts of some * universe of discourse ' whose scope

646 IDEA AND VALUE

will in general be very much greater than x. The develop-
ment of an inhibitory instinct, therefore, can never mean the
setting of one suggestion against another simply, but it means
opening a whole field of possible variations where before there
was but one fixed line. This whole process of balancing
instincts, impulses, suggestions and associations means that the
mental range is becoming more complete. Man's peculiarity
in biological terms is his extraordinary balance — throughout
his being he stands on two feet. It is this same peculiarity
which in psychical terms is expressed in his extraordinary
capacity for gripping large totals, and at last for coming to use
the category * the whole.' The use of this category is reason,1
Now any one of these vista- or field-ideas, as we may call them,
varies greatly in vividness. This vividness will be a function
of the intensity of the co-impulse and also of the intensity of
the non-x suggestion. The consciousness of time, for instance,
is made vivid "by the conflict between the claims of a pungent
present and a pungent future. Let me suggest that a vivid
representation of a future moment and therewith of the time-
field, whether voluntary or resultant, stands for an expendi-
ture of actual physical energy; and that the continuous and
easy presence of future and past to our vision represents a
high level of potential energy in the nervous elements con-
cerned. In general, I would propose that the extent of the
ideal-whole in whose presence a conscious being lives and to
which he adjusts his action is biologically represented by the
potential energy of the nervous centers.

n. THE THEORY OF VALTTE-EXPEBIENCE

The earliest and simplest instincts seem to be of such sort
that the c perception ' of the stimulus and the 'gratification ' of

1 The effect of the counter-instinct in developing a field-idea shows
itself in the phenomenon of hesitation. Now the resultant of two instincts-
is just as determinate as the action of one. Hesitation means not that
two possibilities interact, but that a range of possibilities has to be run
over as a relatively independent object. Man's fitness for reason ia
concomitant with his pre-eminent fitness for hesitation.

IDEA AND VALUE 547

the instinct are one and the same process. Dealing with its
object either by contact or by immediate reaction the subsump-
tion of the general idea is the satisfaction. Despite the
immense veiling of the phenomena of pleasure and pain by
the complexities of development, the profuse demarcation of
states of consciousness as 4 ideas ' which are neither instinct-
ideas nor field-ideas but perhaps fragments thereof, I believe
it can be shown that all pleasure is still of the nature either
of subsumption (wherein an idea, or a conceptual whole, is
applied to one of its instances) or of induction (wherein some
instance or group of instances are provided with a conceptual
whole which covers them). The joy of making a successful
induction and the satisfaction which a child takes in applying
a new word, are typical of all our positive values.

I cannot here make attempt to cover the field of value-
experience, nor to account for all the well-known anomalies of
our feelings of pleasure and pain. I shall review simply in
very rough outline a series of phenomena which seem to
me fundamental in the sense that any theory which will explain
them will explain the rest in the long run.

1. Pleasures connected immediately with the senses and
with the several physiological functions have their marked
rhythmic intervals ; and the longer the period of intermittency,
the greater, in general, the volume of the pleasure (Spencer).
This dimension of pleasure seems to be a function of the nutri-
tion of the organs concerned.

2* Pleasure is itself a destructive and exhausting process.
This is a natural inference from (1), Pleasure heightens
life — that is, it quickens expense ; it draws living to a focus
as a flame creates its own draught. The intensity of a pleas-
ure varies directly with the rate of destructive metabolism.

Pleasure may ' accompany states in which the organism is
being built up' (Eoyce, and many others) ; but the process of
building up is incidental to the pleasure itself, a biologically
fortunate incident indeed, but having no representation in con-
sciousness. The actual succoring of the organism occurs later

648 IDEA AND VALUE

in time than the pleasure and affects first of all parts quite
different from those concerned in the pleasure. In the long
run pleasure is normally profitable to the organism ; it usually
accompanies only such expense as the body is happy to restore ;
the drain affects primarily funds which have been appropria-
ted for that particular purpose ; and these circumstances have
something to do with differentiating pleasurable expense from
painful expense. But per se, pleasure is a drain.

This is a clear instance of the complementary relation
between physical and psychical categories above noticed. As
an experience, pleasure is indeed a filling up of the cup, the
supplying of a need. And the deeper the draft upon vital
resources, the greater the fulfilment of desire. This holds
true to the limit. Only that delight can ultimately satisfy
and fill the soul which drains the body to the point of
death. Indeed, all joy is akin to death; the fortunate drone
unites with the queen, and dies — a rapport symbolic of
all pleasure.

It is, in part, confusion between these inverse psychical and
physical categories which has misled so many of the best
observers into the belief that pleasure is a psychical accom-
paniment of physiological construction. It is extremely doubt-
ful whether such construction enters into consciousness at all.

3. It follows from (2) that the expense in pleasure is not
confined to the organ immediately concerned with the object
which is the occasion of the pleasure. To a certain degree,
change of object will renew pleasure, and variety of object
preserve it ; but there is evidently a common store which every
pleasure draws upon, independent of the particular organ or
object. A person thoroughly exhausted in one joy is ready
to enjoy nothing else but Nirvana.

4. The quality, 'pleasure,' is a function neither of the
special nor of the general exhausting process alone, but of some
relation between them. Pleasure is at the same time a central
and a peripheral experience.

In psychical language, pleasure requires attention. The

IDEA AND VALUE 549

physiological design of consciousness must be one of concen-
tration. However wide the range of a person's affairs his
whole interest must be recalled to the simplest experience he
would enjoy* The process of * becoming absorbed,' let us say
in music, is at first a conflict with the inertia of other trends
of interest : they must all fall into line at last. The inten*
sity of the pleasure depends upon the perfection of the focus,
that is, upon the absence of competition among objects of
attention. The person is all in the pleasure^ no matter if it
be a * mere ' sensation.

5. But if it is important for the perfection of the experience
that other interests cease to compete, it is equally important
that they continue to exist. The quantity of the pleasure
depends on the completeness of the recall, but it also depends
on the presence of interests to be recalled. Pleasure is a func-
tion not simply of the fact of focus, but also of the amount of
stuff concerned in the focusing. In this respect, different
pleasures, so far from being competitive, depend each one on
the existence of the others to give them magnitude : every pleas-
ure has one dimension which varies directly with the number
of instincts, or desires of possible kinds of pleasure — and not
simply with the degree of differentiation, but with the ground
covered by the differentiated interests, that is, with the range
of the objects. In other words, pleasure is a function, among
other things, of the idea-horizon ; any given pleasure echoes
into the whole cavern of a self, and varies in quantity with the
volume and resonance of that cavern. Even within the career
of a single pleasure it is noticeable that as absorption becomes
complete and the circumference of the circle of consciousness
begins to contract, the pleasure has passed its culmination, and
will tend to zero until the interruption of another object of
attention dissipates it,

AH this points to the hypothesis that in all pleasure our
* field-ideas' arc at work (not as thoxight of, but as thinking).
The ' circumference of consciousness ' is a variable which cor-
responds exactly to those changes in the v: vidness of the fielcU

650 IDEA AND VALUE

ideas which we supposed to represent a certain tension or poten-
tial in the centers. And this tension, we said, was in turn a
function of the competition of impulses. For example, the
extension of time-vista both toward and backward which
marked the earliest economic advances of mankind, is concom-
itant with the growing possibility of inhibiting a present
impulse by the idea of a future value. The continuous sub-
jection of impulse to the consent of all the possibilities in a
time-field means indeed an interference with pleasure in the
sense that each claimant for attention has to struggle for pos-
session ; but it means that every object which gains this atten-
tion is the source of a pleasiire whose value is greater than
that of an undisputed enjoyment of the same object in propor-
tion to the enhancement of the time-idea. In physical lan-
guage, every increase of the potential energy of the centers
increases all conscious values in the same proportion.

"What the physiological processes are which play themselves
off in the actual business of enjoyment, I can here do no more
than hint. All pleasure is rhythmic and tends to self -main-
tenance. A mood,ior example, which is a value-experience on
a somewhat roomy and deliberate scale, becomes pleasurable in
proportion as it learns the arts of life, as melancholy feeds and
reproduces itself from node to node of its rhythm. The quality we
call 4 pleasure ' is deeply connected with this formal character
of the processes involved (a character which makes of them pre-
cisely what the mathematicians mean by a * group '). On the
conscious side, it will be evident by a little observation, that
the change which occurs when a trying experience after repe-
tition becomes pleasurable, may be described as the acquisition
of an idea under which each element of the experience is
snbsumable as it rises. When for instance anxiety in a given
situation gives way to confidence, we have acquired on the
intelleotual side, vista, and on the practical side a readiness to
meet with appropriate action whatever type of event may arise
in the course of the experience. So with a mood : it is impli-
citly a Weltanschauung, and it lives by the process of corrob-

IDEA AND VALUE 551

orating its theory of things in the events that pass its focus •,
in this commerce of its idea with the instances of life lies its
satisfaction, be it a gloom or a glory. I propose that the same
is true of organic pleasures. In them, nature has embodied
in structure the idea concerned ; she has solved the problem
of that particular evil for us (for doubtless all the destruc-
tion which is at the heart of consciousness is an organic prob-
lem) ; and the idea she uses will be most difficult to drag into
the foreground of vision. But that the idea is present in phys-
iological concentration, and can in time be read, no one who
follows the spiritual progeny of any instinct can question.

My thesis then is simply this : that all pleasure is essentially
a process of intercourse between an idea and its instance.
The field-ideas of any consciousness will be concerned in all of
its pleasures ; and each of these pleasures will have as one of
its dimensions a quantity which varies with the effective range
of its total field, or, biologically speaking, with the potential
energy of the centers.

III. THE THEORY OF CONSCIENCE

Since Spencer, much has been done by way of distinguishing
conscience from those types of inhibition which more or less
closely resemble ib and ally themselves with it. The work of
describing psychologically the unique characters of conscience
is in the nature of the case always unfinished ; but it will be
sufficient for our purposes if, by way of a phenomenology of
conscience, we may make clear the separation between con-
science itself and the load which conscience carries or adopts.

The load is the relatively changeable aspect of conscience.
Every individual in the course of his career makes numerous
changes in the points of scruple which constitute the burden
or application of his conscience ; the race has done the same
thing on far greater scale. Perhaps the first burden and
certainly the most permanent prot£g£es of conscience are the
* secondary instincts ' — but they are not conscience. This
load makes use of all accessible means of support : pains,

652 IDEA AND VALUE

punishments, associations of approval and disapproval, and all
the well-known instruments of social propagation, so that in
the contents of conscience as we find it in ourselves there are
motives traceable not only to our own education and experi-
ence but to every stage of our historic and phylogenetic jour-
ney, motives in which the aspirations of the Orient, or even
the sorrows of those remote pre-moral ancestors whom Spencer
invokes, are among the comparatively recent relics. But all
this is something other than conscience. No theory indeed
is complete which does not explain the circumstance, remark-
able enough in itself, that conscience has the capacity of ally-
ing itself with all this material — that it is able so early in
human history to lend effective support to a struggling
secondary instinct, and to turn the natural disadvantage of
the remote consideration into some sort of equivalent chance
for survival. But the first point is to distinguish the thing
itself from all its adoptions ; and I shall resume very sum*
marily what seem to me the most significant points in that
separation.

1. Conscience has nothing to do primarily with the way
we feel about any specifiable kinds of action. For it is
a more central affair than can be described in terms of a
connection between types of action and such elements of
experience as might adhere, by association, etc., directly to
these types,

Nothing is more astonishing in the earliest history of the
moral motive than the speed with which it shakes free from
peripheral lines of association and becomes an organic attitude
to action in general, which it requires some use of subsuming
intelligence to apply to particular kinds of action* The func-
tion of those third parties to the moral situation which appear
so early in moral development — the alleged first ancestor,
the totem, the lawgiver, etc. — is primarily that of supporting
conscience in this central position, the position, that is, of
relative independence of the 'types of action' and thereby of
more or less freely variable application to them. Psychologi-

IDEA AM) VALUE 653

cally expressed, the thought of an action has to pass through
the thought of this third party, with the regime he repre-
sents, before that action or kind of action is considered
right or wrong.

2. The painful quality which we attribute to the motive
side of conscience is also a part of its load ; that is, it is adven-
titious. Conscience is necessarily painful only in so far as
all hesitation, or the halting of immediate satisfaction, is pain-
ful. Whatever traces and suggestions of past pains and
punishments conscience bears with it must be referred to its
accretions, not to its nature. The sort of check which
conscience imposes upon action is more nearly like that which
some inarticulate presentiment of a greater good might impose
upon a definable good. But strictly speaking, conscience has
nothing to do with represented pleasures any more than with
represented pains, nor with any represented utilities of an
inheritable sort, as will appear from the following.

3. Conscience resembles the aesthetic consciousness in being
a continuous source of new requirements, not traceable to any
« lessons * of previous experience. If it were the record in us
of experiences of any sort already finished and organically
digested it would tend to fading rather than to finesse. But
nothing more than conscience is subject to explorative origi-
nation, and to the sport of virtuososliip.

The theory of the biological aspect of conscience which 1
have now to propose is simple. It depends upon the theory
of ideas and values already developed, and needs but one
further preliminary, — the proposition, namely, that anyjfeft
in consciousness is, or may become, itself an object of or factor
in consciousness.

Just as we have impressions not only of distinct statio
objects, as stones and trees, but also of processes, as dawning
or waning of light; so we have awareness not alone of high
spirits and low spirits, but also of the rise and fall of spirits,
if these changes are sufficiently rapid ; so also, of the flux of
vigor, of the loosening of attention, etc., — sometimes even

554 IDEA AND VALUE

of waking or falling asleep* I presume that every flux in
consciousness is in some measure an object of consciousness,
for consciousness is by definition, 'that region in which
appearance and reality coincide ' ; though it may well be that
few fluxes are separately registered and noted.

Now if our theory of values is sound, the most significant
of all fluxes in any consciousness for the integrity of its values
would be a flux in the effective range of its field-ideas ; for we
proposed that the field-ideas were factors in every particular
experience of value. Physically, every pleasure has for one
of its factors a coefficient of potential tension in the centers ;
and the potential capacity of these centers has been very grad-
ually extended as instincts have balanced each other, the most
sensitive index of this growth being the range of effective
bearing of our field-ideas upon the immediate business of
living. Any act which rejects the bearing, let us say of the
future upon the present, wilfully obscuring the time-vista and
tending to diminish its efficiency in consciousness, will strike
a blow at the degree of all values in that consciousness. It
will do so, moreover, in a way of which the agent can at the
time have no inkling.

Conscience, I believe, is the perception of this differential;
that is, on the physical side, it is a recognition of the flux,
real or virtual, of potential capacity in the nervous centers ;
on the side of consciousness, it is a sense of flux in the valid
bearing, or efficiency, of my field-ideas. Or, since all field-
ideas in the same consciousness must come, as we have said,
to an understanding with each other, so that they act as parts
of a single field which we may symbolize abstractly as ' the
whole,' conscience may be described simply as the perception
of flux in the awareness of the whole.

In this description the word perception is open to valid
objection, inasmuch as the consciousness which is experiencing
the flux in question does not interpret its experience in terms
of any such flux. The change which affects ' ideas/ conscious-
ness always tries to interpret as a change in * experiences/

IDEA AND VALUE 556

referring its uneasiness to the agency of mysterious objects, —
the ' third parties ' above mentioned. It would perhaps be
better to say not that the flux is * perceived," but that this
actual flux has become a separately effective agent in con-
sciousness, leaving undetermined how consciousness, in its
more or less bedevilled efforts to construe to itself what is
happening, shall report these effects. On the biological side
the language seems to me sufficiently precise. I make no
attempt to portray to my mind the ultimate physical occur-
rences — an attempt which would be presumptuous with far
more knowledge of these processes than I can boast : I am
content to state what I believe to be the true genus of the
event itself. To say that we are aware of a thing, is to say,
biologically, that the representative of the thing is doing some
work within. The work which conscience does, we thought
to be inhibitive in character. Now wherever there are field-
ideas at all, there are fluxes of field-ideas as a matter of course :
but conscience "begins when thisfluw begins to be itself effeo*
tive, through whatever apparatus. Biologically, therefore, we
may say that the * recognition ' of the flux above described
consists in a resistance to a negative flux wherein the capacity
of the centers is diminished. The biological equivalent of
conscience is : A resistance to any tendency/ to diminish the
potential capacity of the nervous centers. If this supposition
is valid, it should at least accord with the phenomena of
conscience which we have brought forward.

It is evident that conscience would from the start be inde-
pendent of external expeiiences associated with any special
* types of action.' Conscience would work just as decisively
in inhibiting an action which threatened our field-integrity in
an entirely new and unheard-of way, as it would in the case
of a thoroughly conventional mode of offence — perhaps better.
But any external sign of disapproval upon an action undesir-
able in this intimate way would add its definite c no ' to the
less definite 4 no * of conscience ; and any considerable group
of such tangible corroborations of conscience would form a

556 IDEA AND VALUE

body of fusions which even to skilled psychological observe
tion, if it were of the prevalent point-blank variety, would
defy analysis. Conscience pure and simple is distinguishable
only in its work of initiative and variation.

And we can see further how conscience would have an
aesthetic and super-useful character. As a sense for a differ-
ential, it would vary with powers of discrimination ; it would be
a function of 'fineness of fiber.' It is entirely conceivable
that a prodigy of conscience should appear in the midst of a
relatively rough-shod community, which could not be the case
if conscience were the vanishing echo of an already fixed
racial inheritance. But while conscience outstrips utility, it is
not hard to see that it would tend to be useful. For the field-
ideas are but signs of the adequacy with which consciousness
presents to itself its world. Conscience at any time stands
for a superabundance of adaptation. But, as in many other
cases, nature has had to adapt herself generously because
there was no way whereby she could adapt just enough and
no more.

Finally, we can see that as it would be impossible for early
man to discover the nature of the evil that threatened him in
his troubles of conscience, so it would be impossible for him
to express it accurately in terms of any known good. Its
voice in him, until he seized upon the sticks and straws of
* empirical' corroborations, would be chiefly that of inarticu-
late resistance, a check which gave no clear reason for its
presence, a categorical imperative or forbiddal. But in so
far as he tried to make plain to himself the uneasiness at his
center he would have to connect it with the widest objects of
his Weltanschauung — his future, his ancestors, and his spir-
its. For these remotest objects are only the outpost stakes
which we have set as marks of the widest total mental ranges
we have thus far conquered. The sense of duty as a strain
indicates that the range of 4 the whole ' is being enlarged.
The sense of pleasure which at length displaces duty in that
same type of action may mean that this degree of totality is

IDEA AND VALUE 667

now secure. But unless we suppose that a man's mind can
reach a complete adequacy of view, the sense of duty can
never, as Spencer suggests, be expected to disappear.

The final test of any such theory as this will be found in its
ability to explain the history of the evolution of conscience.
This immense task must be reserved. What I have here
aimed to do has been accomplished — to show the natural
relations of ideas, values, and duties, through the medium
of their common biological context.

Ill

THE KNOWLEDGE OF INDEPENDENT REALITY1

IF it has been the fault of realism to give the object of
knowledge an independence which makes it meaningless,
it can be no sufficient ground for idealism as a positive doc-
trine to refute a meaningless independence. It is not enough
to bring forward the ever-ready "Ich denke, welches aUe
meine Vorstellungen begleiten kann," or Royee's " Ich will,
welches alle meine Vorstellungen einnehmen kann." For while
the idealist may say, after the mathematician's fashion : c Give
me any object, however independent, and I will show you an
ich-denke, or an ich-will, which can take it in,' the realist may
always rightly reply: 'Give me any ieh-denke, or ich-will,
however capacious, and I will show you an object whose being
is independent of that very thought.'

For it is an act of reflection which discovers the ich-denke
as including the object ; and by reflection upon your reflec-
tion you rediscover the primitive relation of externality between
your mind and its objects: you are unable to make an idea
of your idea except by recognizing something which is not
that idea.

Now philosophy can have no permanent interest in a game
of who shall speak last. While if we decide the matter by
enquiring who has spoken first, the realist carries the day: the
' first intention ' of the mind is that it deals with objects inde-
pendent of its own thought for their being. And no matter
how successful you may be in showing what interest the sub-
ject may have in the objects which it finds, this interest is so

1 Reprinted in part from an article published in The Philosophical
Beview, Vol. xix, No. 3, May, 1910, under the title, "How Ideas reach
jtfeality."

KNOWLEDGE OF THE INDEPENDENT 559

far secondary r, in respect to the existence of the independent
objects, that it would be precisely the same interest were
the objects as different as can be imagined. Your * ich-will *
has no power to determine what the objects shall be ; it assumes
that they are there to be accepted.

That the original and naive attitude of the mind to its
objects requires to be interpreted, we must assert with ideal-
ism. But it seems clear to me from considerations like the
foregoing, that the interpretation cannot be so readily found
as by taking the object up bodily into the subject through
the reflective turn so typical of idealistic reasoning. The
idealist reflection shows successfully that nothing can be real
for us in which it is not possible to trace the mark of ourselves
and of our interests. But this always leaves it possible
that the same objects may bear other marks at the same time ;
and that these other marks are the defining characters of
their objectivity.

The whole life of knowledge can best be understood, I
believe, as an intercourse between the self and an independent
reality. An analysis of cognitive experience should show
what this means, and how idealism in extending the Lam to the
entire scope of the I-think is rendering meaningless the con-
ception of selfhood. Knowledge implies a complete breach,
at some point or region, in the wall of the self. Let us
consider whether any such region can be defined.

There are reasons for looking for such a region first within
physical experience. Some of these reasons have recently been
put forward by M. Bergson. Largely the same reasons were
touched upon by Kant, whose uneasiness about empirical ideal-
ism came in part from the same quarter ; and it may not be amiss
to recall briefly these familiar considerations. The entire
weight of our judgment of Wirklichkeit, Kant asserts, hangs
upon Waltrnehmung.1 We may make to ourselves concep-
tions as we please of things according to the categories (for
1 Postulate des empirisohen Denkens uberhaupt.

560 KNOWLEDGE OF THE INDEPENDENT

instance, of things so related that the condition of one thing
carries with it a definite condition of the other things) ; but
from these conceptions we can never know what actual things
stand in that relation, nor can we understand how they can
be so related, until we refer to physical experience.1 Of our
knowledge of change, a strong point with M. Bergson, Kant
says, that in order to represent to ourselves Veranderung,
we are obliged to make use of Bewegung, or change in space,
for an illustration : without this we cannot make even the gen-
eral meaning of change clear to ourselves, for it is something
whose possibility is quite beyond the grasp of the 'pure
understanding.'2 In sum : however much a priori knowledge
may be possible, we have actually no working ideas at all
without " Wahrnehmung, mithin Empfindung " ; and this
click of sensation is required to give the note of reality to any
part of the system of experience, categories and all.

But as with idealists generally, so with Kant : while we hear
him speaking boldly about 6 external reality ' in quite realistic
vein, we have always to expect from him the annulling stroke,
" Yes — but what do you mean by external reality ? " Kant
has not failed to express himself on this point, most radically
of course in the " Widerlegung des Idealismus." The reality
which we know in physical experience, he says in effect, is
outer, not only in the two senses commonly accepted by idealism,

1 The following sentences from the Allgemeine Anmerkungen zum
System der Grundsatze are noteworthy, partly because of the use of the
expression, ( objective Realitat ' instead of ' Wirklichkeit,' and partly
because Kant is speaking of the reality not simply of individual things
but of the categories themselves — that is, of things as conceived: " Es ist
etwas sehr Bemerkungswurdiges, dass wir die Moglichkeit keines Dinges
nachderblossenCategorie einsehen konnen, sondern immereine Anschau-
ung bei der Hand haben miissen, um an derselben die objective ReaKtiit
desreinenVerstandesbegrinrs darzulegen. . . . Noch merkwiirdiger aber
ist, dass wir, um die Moglichkeit der Dinge zu Folge der Categorien
zu rerstehen, und also die objective Realitat der letzteren darzutun, nicht
bloss Anschauungen, sondern sogar immer aeussere Anachauungen bedtir-
fen" (3d ed., pp.288, 291).

2 Allgemeine Anmerkungen, etc., 2d ed., p. 291.

KNOWLEDGE OF THE INDEPENDENT 561

namely, (1) that objects in space are outer to each other, and
(2) that the system of nature confers upon some objects
not now present to my perception the same reality which is
attributable to these present: but also in a further sense which,
not even the personal ich-denke can engulf, namely, (3) that
here we find this very personal self, in so far as it is a peculiar
individual, in the process of being made. As a knower — so
we might interpret the argument — I am as a whole a being
with numerous peculiarities : I have not only a time-span, and
a time-rate, but a very definite and particular time-span and
time-rate. And so of many another element in my make-up
— the special tension of my desires, the numerical coefficient
of tenacity in my attention, and the like. Now if these pecu-
liarities require explanation, they cannot be explained by any-
thing within the self, because they affect and define the self as
a whole ; but the truth is that we know these peculiarities in
experience, and we know them only by knowing something
else at the same time, namely, an outer reality which is meas-
uring itself against myself, and whose point of contact is found
in sensation. I have no peculiarities which are not first
peculiarities of something not-myself . Whatever may be the
nature of this reality, here, in sensation, I see as it were my
own measurements, my own peculiarities being borne in to me.
The material of sense is, in its first moment, not-self-stuff ,
and only in its second moment, as elaborated in my forms of
experiencing, does it become part of my own being. The
physical judgment, then, juts out into the idealistic night — it
works in a realm where selfhood is metabolic, non-monadic.

The essential point in this position of Kant's might be
formulated in this way. You, the idealist, may legitimately
attribute to, or include within, any self, so much as that self
can understand and reproduce, and no more. The self, at your
own rating, is to be defined by mastery, by self-consciousness,
by self-sufficiency. And since this power of conscious control
fades out as it approaches the particular, and never penetrates
the particular, you must admit a final limit to the individual

662 KNOWLEDGE OF THE INDEPENDENT

self at the point where experience becomes particular, that is,
at physical experience. But reality has always, as one of its
factors, particularity : whatever we think of as real we endow
with the qualities of the reality which plays upon us in sensa-
tion, in so far as sensation is one of the maxima of experience,
setting the standard of pungency, definiteness, completeness of
detail, determinateness to the last point of enquiry, all-there-
Bess ; whatever we helieve real we regard as continuous in
these respects with the reality thus presently touched, and in
such wise continuous that this present moment is regarded as
real by infection from or derivation from the rest of reality.
Thus the successive points of our contact with reality arrange
themselves in what we call a ' history,9 a succession of moments
marked at every point by these characters of particularity and
surprise. Moreover, whatever reality the self has is meas-
ured by the prior and independent reality of the objects
with which it deals ; nor do we finite selves ever acquire a
reality which can subsist apart from our sensible objects.
Dreams, imaginations, volitions, may be regarded as our several
degrees of experimentation in being thus self -sufficiently real.
But with the highest success of these experiments, namely, in
successful action known to be such, our reality remains in large
part centripetal ; we continue to live only by keeping open the
avenues through which that independent being is communi-
cated to us. Hence, in sum : the self does not include reality.
Reality is beyond the self ; not a distinction within the self.
What we can claim of reality is a point of contact, a surface
of osmosis, in sensation : this is the border between the reality
original, and the derivative reality of myself ; it is ' the imme-
diate ' and also * the ultimate,' the last point within and the
first point without. Our experience is metaphysical (or per-
haps better, metapsychical), not phenomenalistic ; but of the
independent reality we possess only the *that' which we
immediately experience as we experience our own limit ; we
possess no 'what' whatever. Such is the Kantian answer to
empirical idealism of physical experience.

KNOWLEDGE OF THE INDEPENDENT 563

In recognizing sensation as a point of vital contact with an
independent reality the above argument seems to me final.
But it is not clear to me that this reality is found only in
sensation ; the irrationalistic conclusion is too hasty. It may
or may not be true that * There is nothing in idea which was
not previously in sense ' ; but it is also true that * There is
nothing in sense which cannot be taken up into idea.' From
which it would follow that we may have not only sensations,
but also ideas of independent reality. Whatever objection
there might be to this doctrine would seem to come from
taking the distinction between idea and sensation, or imme-
diate experience, in too ideal and artificial a manner. The
fixed gulf between idea and sensation is perhaps as great
as any chasm in nature can be ; but still it is a natural
chasm, and the functional relation between the two is like-
wise natural. What this relation is may be illustrated by
a political analogy.1

The state is an effort of society to become fully self-conscious
and self-controlling; its ideal is so far identical with that of
the individual mind. The state deals with its natural data —
namely, its physical and economic status, its customs and
traditions — just as the self does with its natural data, its
sensations and instincts: — it turns them into ideas. The
state calls its own ideas, however, by the name of 'laws' (or
institutions, which are congeries of laws). Now a law is
always either an experiment, or a statement of the conditions
under which experiments must be carried on. The rigidity
and fixity of a law is only such as is necessary for a satisfactory

1 It is remarkable that the state famishes present philosophy with so
few analogies. For the state is still, as in the days of Plato, the most
perfect visible example of the mind in its dealings with reality; while
the things which have happened in politics, and in onr understanding of
politics, since the time of Plato, ought to render the analogy even more
fruitful for us than it was for him* The philosophic value of analogy
as a prelude to exact argument, keeping the argument proportionate
and mutual, has increased rather than diminished with the multiplication
of philosophic differences*

564 KNOWLEDGE OF THE INDEPENDENT

experiment. In order to know how life works we must pro-
ceed by assuming that we already know, and holding to the
assumption until it is proven wrong. So the ideas which we
individuals make are either experiments or conditions of
experiment: they are so many ways of assuming that we
already know reality. Now there are three points in this
analogy which are important for our present enquiry :

I. The law is not something else than the custom which it
transforms into an institution : it is the custom itself acquiring
the power of speech and so of political entity.

When once there exists such a thing as a political world, a
world wherein modes of action survive at last only hy convincing
some established organ that they ought to survive, then every
custom is bound in time either to become an institution or to
disappear. To be translated into law is only the process of
entering the new status, of acquiring the new powers of self-
defence and self-maintenance. 80 the idea is not something
other than the instinct or the sensation. It is the identical
thing, with newly acquired powers of speech and of influence
upon action. To become idea is the fate which is imposed
alike upon all sensations and all instincts because of the fact
that there is such a forum in nature as a 'mind.'

Hence, while we may have, for example, ideas of things
static, and sensations or intuitions of things changing ; we
have just as truly sensations of things static and ideas of
things changing (it being understood that the sensation
knows not what it is sensation of). There is no element
of experience present to sensation which is not also present
to idea. The idea is the experience made politically potent
with reference to other experiences; it is the experience
freed from the barriers of its historical context, able to com-
bine with other experiences as determinants of action, without
regard to original position in space or time. The idea endows
the experience with a real faculty of transposition, akin to the
assumed revolvableness and superposableness of the geometri-

KNOWLEDGE OF THE INDEPENDENT 565

cal magnitudes ; and nothing else than this new capacity of
relation is meant by the fact that the experience appears to
a mind. Hence, if there be any such thing as an immediate
experience of time, there will necessarily be such a thing as
conceptual time also ; and this conceptual time will not be a
different time, but identically the same time, with the new
capacity of being regarded in segments, transposable, compa-
rable, measurable.1

In general, the idea is the experience itself, made an active
part of the conscious unity we call a self, understood by other
experiences, and understanding them in turn.

II. All laws are subject to error and revision except the
laws which contain the conditions of experiment.

A law contains besides the representation of a custom also a
judgment, or enactment, which sets that custom in a positive
position in the public life. The implied judgment may be
thus interpreted : ** In this enactment the custom, or impulse,
or interest, in question is given its rightful meaning, force, and
bearing in the public life in general." This judgment, which
is the experimental side of the law, may be in error; and its
error can be corrected only by the same reality which the law
undertakes to entertain, namely, by custom, economic fact and
human nature as found in the tendencies, customs, and feelings
of the populace.

The constant flux and revision of positive law is (supposedly)
the renewed attempt to determine the true political interpre-
tation of this same reality. Whatever scope there is for
originality in public life, it cannot lie in the invention of new
material for that life, but only in the mode of voicing this
permanent material. Hence while the power of originality

1 It seems a wholly deplorable misuse of language to say that because
conceptual time or metrical time is artificial, it is therefore not the ( real '
time. As well say, because tho family as now instituted is an artificial
family, it is not the real family. It may not be the ideal family, nor the
original family ; but I know not where to look for the « real ' family except
in the idea of families — as they are.

666 KNOWLEDGE OF THE INDEPENDENT

lies with the successful utterer, the source of originality itself
is in the people, in their dumb feeling of wrong, and in their
dumb anticipation of the direction of right. They are the
social sensation and primitive fact. They are the primary
and permanent reality which in correcting the errors of law,
constitutes the goal and object of all original law-making.

Correspondingly, in the individual mind, sensations and
feelings are the Demos. All ideas are subject to error, with
the exception noted : and the reality which corrects them is met
in sensation. Further, as Bergson rightly says, there can be
no personal originality apart from this Demos of experience.
The best originality of the mind is but the truth of nature ; it
is the master stroke of release, the release of nature into the
condition of idea. But what is thus released is still the same
reality which was present to sensation ; were it any other the
intention of the idea itself would be defeated.

III. Laws which contain the general conditions of experi-
ment, that is, the laws regarding laws, law-making, law-cor-
recting, and law-enforcing, which together are the constitution
of a state, are not subject to error in the same sense in which
the positive law is thus subject, and so not subject to correction
in the same sense.

This part of the law differs also in this further respect from
the positive law : That it does not seem to appear as part of
the reality met with in external sensation, in the original facts
of society : it is in a peculiar way the state itself, it is the new
thing which has happened to make all the work of social self-
thinking in law necessary. We might say, after the old
epistemological formula: the customs and predicaments of
natural society contain all the subject-matter of law — except
the political constitution itself.

Nevertheless, constitutions also are subject to secular evolu-
tion. There are such things as unnatural constitutions ; hence
there is such a thing as a natural constitution. Is it possible
that in the datum of state life there is anything which might

KNOWLEDGE OF THE INDEPENDENT 567

serve as an original and slow corrective to the constitution ?
May it be that the principles of administration that become
customary in the family, and in the collective meeting of
economic emergencies, constitute the reality, as it were in the
form of sensation, which the state announces as idea? It
cannot have been otherwise1 and it is not otherwise : the sense
for authority and the logic of authority in elemental human
nature is authority for the state in its interpretation of
authority. The constitution of the state is the state itself,
and yet it conforms to an external reality which is part of
the datum of its existence. The customs to which it gives
political birth are already in their crude form, administered
customs. Not only the positive part of the law, therefore, but
the law of the constitution itself, the relatively a priori part
of law, has its external object in experience to which it must
conform, and from which it receives continuous instruction.

So also with the mind. It has its principles of experiment
which are not subject to correction and error as are its
common predicates. These principles of experiment, the
ideas of cause, substance, and the like, are the mind itself in
its dealings with its sensations. Nevertheless, these also are
not wholly nor primarily internal. They are first part of the
reality of direct experience. For this experience is never
experience of physical nature alone: it is experience of
administered nature. The mind has mind as part of its real
object ; and itn ideas of ideas are not originally got from views
of itself, but from views of its very external reality.

This is a hard flaying ; but it is the truth. The reality
which we touch in sonsation is nature known ; and hence
nature already endowed with the characters of the idea. The
objectivity of the world extends to its space, its causality, its
matter, its energy ; and we have no other system of nature
than that which we find already established in experience*
This reality which we experience and which we know to be
independent, is not an unknown being, giving rise to sensation,

1 See especially on this point, G. Tarde, Lea transformations dn pouvoir.

568 KNOWLEDGE OF THE INDEPENDENT

and so to physical experience, and so to reflexive experience ;
but it is a full-fledged world of nature and thought. Our
original experience is just as truly an experience of other-mind
as it is of other-things ; and the independence of the other-mind,
and of the other-things, are one independence.

If we are right, then, the idea reaches independent reality
in the same way that sensation reaches it. Experience is
experience of independent being, known both in sensation and
in idea at once.

So far, I have tried to state and illustrate a doctrine, not
to prove it. But it is capable of proof ; and the proof takes the
form of the historic ontological argument. The ontological
argument is a way of inferring from an idea to a reality.
44 Because I have a certain idea," so it runs, "there must be a
reality which corresponds to it." As it stands it certainly can-
not apply to all ideas. To apply it, it is necessary to distinguish
first between the ideas which are hypothetical in character and
expect correction, and those which are not thus tentative ; this
distinction we have already sketched. But to put it strictly ;
For every idea which expects correction there is another idea
determining how that correction must come, and hence not
subject to correction at the same time and in the same sense.
And since there are some ideas subject to correction, there
must also be some ideas or idea not subject to correction at all.
In the rough, these stable ideas are the ideas which guide my
constant experimenting. I do not try here to deduce them,
nor to decide whether they are one or many. We know well
enough in what direction to look for them : they include some
constant elements in the spatial, substantial, causal, and social
aspects of my world. But the point which I wish to make, and
which constitutes the necessary amendment of the historic onto-
logical argument is this : These ideas guide me only in so
far as they are at the same time idea and experience, the idea
in question being no other than the experience recognized.

For whatever may be the variable and whatever may be the

KNOWLEDGE OF THE INDEPENDENT 569

constant elements in my present idea, that portion of it which
is still subject to error, and so subject to correction, is expe-
rienced in no wise differently from that portion of it which is
not subject to correction. For example, in so far as I experi-
ence cause at all, I experience it all as one real fact, and there
is no type of error to which this idea is subject which can
refer me outside the precinct of this same objective reality for
its truth. Hence we may say: Whatever idea I have of
causality, in that sense there is a real causal relation between
things. Or, because I have an idea of space, space is real.
Or, again, in whatever sense I can think, or imagine, or deny
the existence of a fellow-mind, in that sense the fellow-mind
is real, and an object of my experience.

If this thesis seems incredible, let one imagine what it would
be to experience, in the most satisfactory manner conceivable,
another mind — let us say c to be within another mind * ; let
him then compare the imagined experience with his present
experience — and let him state, if he can, in what essential
respect these two experiences differ. Until such statement can
be made, I need not hesitate to assert as I have done, that our
original experience of independent reality is an experience of
nature known by an independent knower. And now let me
summarize what this independence amounts to, and in what
way idealism is modified by admitting it.

The most general statement that can be made is this : That
real objects are independent in whatever sense we can imagine,
or think, or enquire about, or deny, their independence. The
existence of * the independent object* is in fact the most gene-
ral subject-matter capable of ontological proof. Tho independ-
ence of any object is the independence which I do in truth
experience in it ; and if I wish to know more nearly what that
experience amounts to, I can look nowhere but to those ideas
which refer to that experience. Let me return for a moment
to our illustration.

The independence of the real object, in the case of the state,

570 KNOWLEDGE OF THE INDEPENDENT

means in part this : That nature pursues her way in spite of
the laws if the laws are wrong ; but that if the laws are right,
she pursues her way more easily. If this be true her independ-
ence is limited. The laws, in fact, are organs of nature at
the same time that they are organs of the state. And because
this is so, they learn to express the very independence which
their object maintains. Nothing is more conspicuous in the
history of law than its progress in the definition of the status
and technique of an independent citizenry ; it comes to confer
upon them a kind of individual separateness of being which
they originally neither had nor desired. In the ideas of prop-
erty, in the specialization of labor, and especially in the use
of money (by which we are given a kind of solitude in the use
of goods inconceivable to early man), the state seems to be
introducing human nature to its own independent character,
and so giving rise to more of that independent ferment to
which it must submit its own demands.

And now, in the case of the idea, we have to say likewise,
that the idea is at the same time an instrument of the self and
an instrument of that very reality which it is regarding as its
object ; and that the idea has its own way of presenting
to the self the independence of that object. How boldly
language has come to attribute independence to the various
objects of experience ; how thoroughly 4 substantive * our nouns
have become in their grammatical relations; how unhes-
itatingly we confer a kind of absoluteness upon each thing
named, as if it might exist in its own right. And thia
assumption, as it is meant, receives the pragmatic sanc-
tion: it works; it continues to work better as the world
grows old ; and it alone works. It works because it is the
truth of reality ; because it successfully expresses not alone the
ultimate condition of all experiment, trial, and error, but at
the same time the most primitive fact of experience itself —
the experience of that not-znyself which is permanently mak-
ing me. And in this sense, rather than in the reflective sense,
the truth of nature, even in her independence, is to be found

KNOWLEDGE OF THE INDEPENDENT 571

in the idea, and in the idea alone. The real independence of the
object is the independence which I learn to attribute to it ; it
being well understood that it is not a matter of my choice
whether or not I do thus attribute independence to my objects.
The independence is a matter of experience first, and of idea
afterward. But now, more specifically, what does this inde-
pendence mean ?

It means, in the first place, priority of "being. Not neces-
sarily temporal priority (though this is part of it), but orig-
inality ; the kind of priority which I instantly experience as
1 find myself being made. The real is the source of myself,
both as particular being through my historical context, and
as a being with ideas. In this experience, I see beyond
the self that is being made : my knowledge runs out in advance
of my existence, and lays hold on what I am not. It is at this
point that idealism, if we have been right in this argument, will
have to suffer restatement. We cannot identify I-am with
I-think. It is possible to experience and to think being which
is prior to me, which is in reality not-me. The I-think has a
scope which exceeds the I-am by one remove.

True, there is nothing in what I-think which can be excluded
from me ; what I know is in the process of becoming me, in
so far as I am able to appropriate it. The I-think represents
the explorative, reaching-over function of my being ; it is my
spiritual metabolism — by it I take root in the soil and breathe
in the air of the conscious world beyond, and assimilate it to
myself. Thus though all reality be in truth spiritual, the
finite knower knows realistically ; the being of the object is
prior to his own.

In the second place, independence means necessity and
authority. The reality is that which, in knowing, I cannot
change, that which corrects my errors, and that which deter-
mines how error shall be corrected. My objects as they come
to me in history are my fate. My general * will to be rational *
or to * accept the will of the world t Has no force to determine

572 KNOWLEDGE OF THE INDEPENDENT

what they shall be. My attitude to reality as it particularly
is (except for my will that there he a particular reality) is not
one of constructive willing, but one of refusing to reject ; and
I continue to refuse to reject, that is, to 'hope' or to * believe,'
in part because I know the ontological relation between my will
and the will of the whole. This knowledge does not abolish
the authority of facts ; it makes me willing to accept that
authority and to win what power is possible to me through
obedience thereto.

There is a third aspect of the independence of objects
which is a mutual (commutative) independence, and which is
best illustrated by looking at our state from the other end.
Given a sovereign, the several inhabitants of a territory are
more independent of each other than before, or else less so.
That is, — some distant ones are brought into a significance
which they had otherwise absolutely lacked ; while the adja-
cent ones are able to ignore the proximity of one another, as
otherwise would be impossible. Perfect sovereignty makes
neighborhood an indifferent relation. The independence of
each other which citizens thus acquire is the counterpart of
the nearest approach to a realistic independence which the
world of knowledge can show. The kind of independence,
namely, which is visible in particular facts, items of informa-
tion in general, contents of purely arbitrary memory. These
fragments bear upon me only by way of the general fact of
sovereignty, the reality to which we belong in common ; they
come but vaguely, distantly, and by virtue of the habitualness
of my mind, under the scope of my will. Thus arises the third
meaning which independence may have: To say that an
object is independent of me may be as in (1) and (2) the
other way of saying that I am dependent upon it ; or it may
mean (3) that the object has no bearing upon my other present
objects except through the distant medium of ' the reality.'
In this tertiary and derived sense, independence of me means
independence of myself as an object to myself, and is mutual.
The chair which I do not want I can put out of the room

KNOWLEDGE OF THE INDEPENDENT 573

without making any significant difference either to the chair
or to the other chairs in the room, or to my own empirical self.
This is the freedom of parts with reference to each other,
which is due to their common dependence upon some absolute
third.

To sum up : The independence of the object is such as is
correlative to my various types of dependence, and to my pecu-
liar type of independence. The idealist is always right in
turning upon the realist with the demand : * But what do you
mean by independence ? " The realist is right in insisting that
an allegation of meaning in answer to the question does not
swallow the object up into the subject, the distinction between
what I am and what I think being a persistent one for finite
subjects. The force of the idealistic criticism of realistic
epistemology is confined, so far, to showing up inconsistency
or impossibility of thought. And we return thus to Spinoza's
definition of substance as 'That which is by itself and is
conceived by itself'; not because logic controls Nature, but
because logic is Nature, in the only form in which Nature can
now be approached by human consciousness.

IV

NOTE ON LEUBA'S THEORY OF THE NATURE OF
THE MYSTIC'S LOVE OF GOD

Eis from the point of view of the principle of alternation
hat I would judge the theory of Leuba, who in several
well-known articles * has done much to supply the lack of a
psychology of the mystic's motive. He has rightly distin-
guished the two sides of this motive. The ambitious element
appears to him as a fixed necessity for moral perfection, a
" tendency to the universalization of action," amounting in some
persons almost to hypersesthesia of the moral sensibility. The
element of love on the other hand appears to him under a very
earthly guise, as a need for satisfying the instinctive affections,
a need for " organic enjoyment," in which a thwarted human
desire finds an ideal route to its satisfaction. The divine love,
on this basis, is a form of the pursuit of subjective pleasure ;
no wonder that it seems to Leuba to be inconsistent with that
other fundamental motive, the moral ambition so often expressed
in the severe asceticism of the mystic's self-discipline; no
wonder that the mystic's development is read by him as an
elimination of Eros, a conquering of love, " a reconstitution of
the individual under the influence of the disposition toward
universalized action, wherein he may reach entire deliverance
from the desires of the natural man."

I cannot but believe that this apparent conflict and incom-
patibility of motive has been created by Leuba himself, through
the view he takes of the nature of the divine love. At the
same time Leuba is fundamentally right in recording the con-

* Revue philosophique, vol. 54 (1902, n), pp. 1 ff. and 441 &; voi
57 (1904, i), pp. 70 ff. Mind, N. s., vol. 14 (1905), pp. 15-27, etc.

LEUBA'S THEORY 575

trast between these two motives : incompatible they are not,
but antithetical they surely are. And it is easy for the
antithesis to become an antagonism : on the organic level, love
and ambition do look in opposite directions. The practically
obvious thing about love is that one turns away from work ;
and the motive which is at bottom a wholly moral demand for
the renewal of the worth of work may easily be mistaken for
a denial of that worth : love, ignoring its own nature as
transmuted ambition, enters into a false competition with duty.
And duty may respond by forgetting that it is nothing but
transmuted love. Thus the antithesis becomes a practical
hostility or opposition, creating falsely partisan moral philos-
ophies, rigoristic on one hand, epicurean on the other.

This apparent conflict which is evident in things partial is
also possible in things total : it entangles the mystic not less
and not more than other men. The love of God then becomes
a path of dissipation, antagonizing moral ambition : but it is
not true that this is its natural character. We are bound to
define the motive of mysticism by its normal condition, if it
has one — even though this normal condition has never yet
been realized. And we are still more bound to give the mystics
credit for their best achievements, and for their deepest dis-
criminations. No one who reads the mystics can suppose that
they have been unaware of precisely this danger ; nor that
they have been undiligent in guarding against it. They have
seen, and precisely stated, the truth that the highest possi-
bilities of experience are also the most perilous. Let me
quote a passage from Tauler on this point :

There are those who have lost their way in the spiritual life,
because they have undertaken to live this life after their own conceit,
without the direction of God. They have a desire to taste inward
spiritual comfort ; but this desire (not wholly freed from subjectivity)
becomes in them a veritable spiritual unchastity : for it is nothing
other than a natural inclination or love which is bent and crooked
inward into itself, seeking in reality its own comfortableness.
Outwardly, these two types of love, the natural and the divine, are

576 LEUBA'S THEOEY

as like as two hairs of the head ; bat in their inward meaning they
are wholly alien. For the true lover of God offers himself up wholly,
together with everything he has and is capable of; and cannot
tolerate the thought of any other appeasement of his longing than
the ineffable Good, which is God himself. The others fix their
minds upon the blessings and sweets which they demand from God,
and if they fail to get them they are beside themselves with impatience
and violent clamor. What they desire is a type of rest and comfort
naturally pleasing to all creatures : and such an experience is possible
to any person who knows the art of emptying himself of imaginations
and impulses. Let a man but separate himself from all contingencies
and from all works, and there will come over him in this state of empti-
ness a peace which is very great, lovely, and agreeable, and which is
in itself no sin since it is part of our human nature. But when it
is taken for a veritable possessing of God, or unity with God, then it
is a sin ; for it is in reality nothing else than a state of thorough
passivity and apathy untouched by the power from on high, which
any man can attain without special grace of God. It is a purely
negative state from which (if one in arrogance calls it divine) nothing
follows but blindness, failure of understanding, and a disinclination
to be governed by the rules of ordinary righteousness.1

It has never been easy for human nature to sustain its love
at the level of true worship; it has never been easy to keep
integrity in presence of that seductive movement of reflection
which seizes upon an experience and forgets its first intention ;
there is a statistical certainty of some lapse, and this, if
Delacroix is right is precisely the thing which necessitates the
long agonies of the second stadium of the mystic's life cycle.
The important point, however, for a fair scientific theory is
this : that mysticism has its own corrective within itself. It
recurs to the essential identity of its love and its ambition.

To know that the love of God is of the same substance with
moral ambition decides some questions about the psychological
nature of that love. But it does not decide the worth of
Leuba's thesis that it has close psychological kinship with
the love of man and woman. It would be necessary in a

i Freely taken from Predigten, n, pp. 335-339 (ed. 184=1).

LEUBA'S THEORY 577

complete theory to show the wide differences of these two as
well as their striking likenesses ; but there is no more important
scientific task than to define with accuracy the extent of this
likeness so universally recognized in literature and history, in
the imagery of the mystics themselves. To my mind it is the
principle of alternation which defines this likeness. Beyond
doubt, the mystic's exaltation sweeps up into its own current
whatever in the thousand-fold alternate swingings of human
nature moves in its own direction, — not as their product but
as their master. It would indeed be surprising if the sexual
nature of man, with its movement away from the sphere of
deeds to the sphere of substance, with its strong tide away
from the particular to the over-individual and racial, with its
suggestion of total, infinite, and yet immediate worth, did not
more quickly and completely than any other human impulse
discover in worship its ultimate meaning and law. This must
be the case : not because the love of God is at bottom sexual
love, but because sexual love is potentially love of the divine.
As to the details of Leuba's theory, I leave them to be dealt
with by his competent critic, De Montmorand.1 But the main
criticism to be passed upon that theory is only that it is not
the whole truth ; and in this case anything short of the whole
truth is untrue.

The whole truth lies surely in this direction — that all of
our human impulses and loves are akin. And the psychology
of mysticism waits less for an analysis of the love of God than
for an analysis of all other human desires. It is not this love
but those that need explanation. The love of God is the one
natural instinct of man : worship is the one deed which answers
as an echo all other deeds in history. Upon one point the
psychologies of Plato, Augustine, and Spinoza are agreed:
that all special desires are refracted desires for the Absolute
Good. We moderns with superior analysis have not yet
regained in our own tongue these results. We need to know

* Revue philosophique, vol. 56 (1903), pp. 382 ft; vol. 57 (1904),
pp. 242 ft; vol. 58 (1904), pp. 602 ft ; voL 60 (1905), pp. 1 ft

578 LEUBA'S THEORY

the "laws of the transformation and equivalence" of desires
and values: then we shall see how they may be one and all, not
suppressed by, but paid over into the all-consuming passion
of religion. Both Leuba and his critic fall into the error
of supposing that in the perfecting of mysticism some side
of human nature is put under, some dissociation or amnesia
has been accomplished, so that the "lower centers" never
again assert themselves. All this seems foreign to the facts.
For all reasons I should prefer to think that in mysticism the
needs of sex, together with all other needs, are understood
and satisfied; that all the hundred voices of human desire
are here brought to unison. With this understanding and not
otherwise can I see how religion is to fulfil its assumed func-
tions : to keep from mutual estrangement the primitive in us
and the far-civilized ; to offer individual souls — malformed
in the specializations of our social order, or mutilated in its
accidents — the possibility of complete personality ; to unify
in wish and will, as reason does in principle, the whole moral
existence of man.

INDEX

INDEX

Italics indicate words or phrases used in this book with special meanings.

ABSOLUTE, the, vi, 183-200, 331, 401,

415, 435, 450, 472, 473 f., 511.
Abstract universal, 417 1, 434.
Adolescence, 533.
Agnosticism, 192.
Almra Mazda, 320.
Allegory, see Symbol.
Alternation, principle of, 5, 9

405-427, 450 n., 458, 474, 575.
Altruism (see also Egoism), 136, 496 ff.,

509.
Ambition, 359, 360, 367, 414, 422, 517,

374 f.

Analogy, 389, 390, 392, 563 n.
Ancestor worship, 231-232.
Anger, 127 n., 534.
Angier, R. P., 529 n.
Animism, 230, 300, 317.
Anselm, 307.
Antagonism, 509.
Anticipation of attainment of artsy 30,

31, 33, 198, 221 ff., 238, 428-434, 437-

439, 512.

Antinomiamsm, 364, 400
Apperceptive mass, 127 f ., 285, 527.
Appreciation, judgments of (see also

Value), 68, 539.
Apriori, the concrete, 278, 437 n.
Aristotle, 433.
Artificiality, the artificial self, 413 ff.,

420n., 430,4311, 434,438, 454, 527 f.
Arty, the, 14-26, 31, 103, 138, 160,

407 ff., 427, 462-483, 513.
Asceticism, 372-374, 509.
Association, 222 f.
Atheism, 225 f., 323.
Attainment, religious, 51, 53, 65, 428-

441. See 'anticipation of attain-
ment.'

Augustine, 75, 307, 577.
Attention, 411 n., 412 f., 527 ff., 549.
Authority, xi, 30, 229-230, 429, 571.
Automatism, 425.
Aversion, 532.

BAGBHOT, 455, 520*
Baldwin, 247.

Beauty, 256, 420 f ., 451 f., 491 f.
Being and quality (see also Value), ch.

ri,alsopp 203 f., 331, 464 n.
Bennett, C. A., 403 n.
Bergson, x, 25, 80 n., 82-88, 122, 134,

559,560,566.
Berkeley, 194, 195, 246.
Bernard, 361.
Biology, biological method, 44-46, 47,

542-546; in theory of ideas, 113 ff.,

120, 122, 235, 258, 543-557.
Body (see also Mind and Body), 258,

333, 372.

Boehme, Jacob, 363, 479.
Bonaventura, 371.
Brahm, 102, 185, 186, 329.
Brahmanism, 333.
Brinton, 234.
Bruno, 361.
Buddha, Buddhism, 5, 333, 337, 512,

620.

CATHERINE OF SIENA, 375.
Causality, 305, 307, 313, 613.
Certainty, 30 f ., 295 f ., 361 f ., 448 n. f .,

454^456, 512.

Chance (see also Pluralism, Probabil-
ity), 167, 462, 503.
Change, 84-86, 186-188, 560.
Changeless, the, 183 ff.
Character, 134, 147, 190, 203, 265,463,

527.

Charity, 199.
Chesterton, 260.
Christ. Christianity (see also Jesus

Christ), 151, 224, 324, 330, 334, 337,

362, 378, 513, 520-524.
Coenesthesia, 392 f .
Commitment, 509.
Communication, logic of, 246, 272 f.,

294, of feeling, 77.
Concrete apriori, see Apriori.
Concrete universal, 400, 407, 413.
Conscience (see also Duty, Morality,

Right), 551-657.
Contemplation, 383.
Continuity (see also Discontinuity, Like-

582

INDEX

ness, Novelty, Tradition), 478 ff.,

484.

Convention, 400, 417.
Conversion, 73, 383.
Cosmological argument, 305.
Cosmology, 516.
Cowper, 426.
Creation, 286, 287, 308, 440, 457, 485,

561 f
Creativity (see also Originality), xvii,

23-26, 149, 150-162, 167, 203, 205 f.,

296, 299, 364, 440, 457-460, 462-484,

489.
Creed (see also Dogma, Knowledge,

Certainty), 3, 37, 39, 42, 70, 73, 139,

150.

Critical attitude, 416, 432, 532.
Criticism, philosophical, 48.

DEATH, 231.

Deduction, 312, 477.

Deification, 388, 512.

Delacroix, 394, 425 f., 449 n., 576.

Descartes, 191 f., 202, 246, 276, 314.

Detachment from particulars (see also
Stoicism), 487 f., 493 ff., 509.

Dialectic, 60, 284, 309, 322 ff., 412,
460.

Difference, source of (see also Creativ-
ity), 203, 481.

Disconnection, Discontinuity, 180,
398 ff., 429.

Dogma, 4571, 406.

Dualism, 172,406.

Duty (see also Conscience), 251, 414,
417, 427, 440, 556, 575.

EOKHABT, 371, 375, 391 n., 430.

Ecstasy, 536.

Education, religious (see also Religion,

propagation of), 522.
Egoism, and altruism, 126, 136.
Egoistic revelation^ 430 n.
Egypt, religion of, 232.
Emerson, 258, 333, 398 f ., 459.
Emotion, see Feeling, Passion.
Empiricism (see alsoExperience,Know-

ledge), xvii, 112, 283, 295, 387 n.
Energy, 127; potential, 546, 551, 554 f.
Enthusiasm, 509.
Epictetus, 377, 452.
Error, 277, 291, 292, 297, 320, 411, 459 f.,

565 ff.

Esoteric, 459.
Evanescence of religions insight, 144;

and of social experience, 245.
Evil, 134, 174 ff., 200, 203, 206, 208,

21&-226, 440, 485-514, 561.

Evolution, mental, see Knowledge,
growth of ; see also Religion, evolu-
tion of

Experience, 215, 280, 28 1, 803, 310;
as source of religious knowledge,
see Knowledge.

Explanation, 87, 120, 197, 252, 540.

FACT, 100, 137, 485, 515.

Faculty, special, 02, 370 f .

Faith, 31, 62, 144, 148, 150, 249 f., 440,
513.

Fate, 152, 181, 194, 334, 485, 516.

Fatigue, 415-417, 5lffi.

Fear, 72, 137, 145, 2113, 234, 362.

Fechner, 468 f ., 470, 473.

Feeling (see also Faith, Fear, Love,
Passion, Worship), 88, S4-1S8 (esp.
64 f., 68 n f , 137), 148, 400, 437;
religion of, 49; self -interpretation,
mistaken, 74.

Fenelon, 378 n., 385, 395 n. f .

Fetich, 239.

Fichte, 147, 158, 297, 333, 495.

Finite situation, 50.

Forgiveness, 177, 180, 383, 523.

Form and matter, 197, 198, 406, 452-
455.

Fortune (see also Fate, History, Provi-
dence), 485 ff., 515 ff.

Francois de Sales, 428 n.

Freedom (see also Necessity), xii, xvi,
2.J, i>4, 152, 173, 174, 299, 305, 412-
414, 415 a., 420, 437, 483, 542, 546 n.

Friendship, 140, 452, 507.

Gamers, 448, 476, 488.

God, vi, 52, 205, 206-226, 295 f . ; finite
and infinite, 225-226 ; idea of, 139,
141 f., 14«, 161, 152, 161, 216 f.,
m f ., 294 f ., 299, 320-380, 459, 481 f . ;
incarnate, see Incarnation; love of,
see Love of God; personality, 226,
323-388 ; proofs of, 30* ff . ; value of,
136, 207-220; will of, 7, 498, 501;
work of, xv, 6, 208 ff., 440, 445-446,
51&-624.

Gods and spirits, 818 f .

Godf ernanx, H9ft n.

Good (see also Happiness, Pleasure,
Right, Value), 195-197, 205, 405, 410,
413, 415 f., 404, 677.

Greek religion, 320, 384.

Grief (see also Evil, Sorrow, Pain), 200,
223.

Groups, closed, self -perpetuating, 463-
466,618,640,650.

Gnyon, Madame, 860, 394, 426 f ., 686.

INDEX

583

HABTMANN, B. von, 38, 538.

Happiness, 105, 210,217-226,365,485-
514.

Hebrew religion, 202, 329.

Hegel, x, xri, 155, 195, 307, 503, 538.

Hell, xiv, 47, 170, 268.

Henotheism, 325

Herbert, George, 2.'!9.

Historical religion, 320, 446, 448,
519 ff.

Historic virtues, the, 522 f.

History (see j Jso Time), 502 j philoso-
phy of, chh. ii, xxxi-xxxiii, and pp.
400 f ., 440 ; (see also Religion, evolu-
tion of); principles of interpretation,
41, 42, 57, 58, 180.

Hobbes, 504.

Hoffding, H., 18, 38, 91 f., 353 n.

Holy places, 239.

Holy Spirit, 441, 478.

Horace, 500.

Howison, 290, 503.

Hugo of St Victor, 379 n.

Hume, 277 f.

Hypothesis, 214, 276 f., 476.

IDBA, 19, 44, 45-48, 03, 79-155, 198,
2011, 235, 258, 275-278, 307 f., 315 f.,
450 f., £^-^6', 563-/7J; action the-
ory of, 1 13 ff. ; circle-diagrams, 80 f .,
101 ; fmitude and infinitude of, 90 ff ;
functions of, HO, iU, 110, 1 12; inde-
pendence of feeling, 1 10 ff . ; mean-
ing, external, 117 ff ; of whole, see
Whole idea ; permanence, llOf. , rig-
idity and change, 70 ff. , system, 111,
119; vividness, 117,546.

Idealism, v, x-xx, 44, ir>7-162, 1691.
195, 209, 2891, 314, 437 XL, 558-572.

Identity, individual (see also Personal-
ity, Self), 110, 200,264.

Ignorance, knowledge of, 235.

Illumination, MH, 449 n.

Imagination, ftffl, 502.

Imitation, 4015, 518 1

Immanence, 320 ff., 406.

Immediacy, Immediate, 316, 355, 357,
390,4391, 448 n,l

Immortality, Future Life (see also Self-
preservation), 491, 52t 141, 144, 1H5,
210 1, 232, 204, 300, 512, 514, 520 1

Incarnation, 211, 321, 330, 515-524.

Independence, 23, 110ft, 120, #0-Ifl»,
278,284,314, 668-W2.

Individual, Individuality (see also Per-
sonality, Self), 161, 255,417ff.,430ff.,

Indra,'l02.

Induction, 237, 408, 409, 474-477.

Ineffable, Ineffability (see also Mys-
tery), 19, 348, 353, 363, 398.

Infallibility, 455.

Infinite, 19, 236, 376.

Inge, 430.

Inspiration, 8, 426, 445, 461, #8-484.

Institution, religious, 519 ff.

Instinct, 241, 49, 50, 88, 1281, 151,
323, 341, 358, 420, 474, 483, 504, 527,
544 ff., 5511

Intellect (see also Idea), 82, 98, 99.

Interest, see Pleasure, Value, Will.

International law and religion, 521.

Irrelevant universal, 193, 196, 200-221,
236-238.

Islam, 337, 520.

JAMBS, WILLIAM, 38, 89, 184, 185, 220,

247, 302 1, 390, 428, 503, 537.
Janet, 537.

Jesus Christ, 200, 205, 331, 357, 512.
Jevons, F. B., 233 n., 458.
Justice, 175-179, 205.

KANT, 37, 60, 193, 195, 226, 276, 303,
420 n., 559-562.

Karma, 333.

Knowledge, 191 ; and the knowing pro-
cess, 408-411 n., 4571; experience
as source of, 154, 215, 217, 229-312 ;
growth of, 5, 96-99, 120, 458, 478 1 ,-
in religion, peculiar difficulty of, 32,
39, 51-54, 56-03, 74, 91, 98, 100,
142-144, 149; in religion, how possi-
ble (see also Kevelation), vii, viii,
xiv, 32, 37-52, 98, 109, 154 ff., 229-
337 ; love of, see Reality, interest in ;
of other minds, see Social experi-
ence ; scientific and religious, 3, 31,
01, 98, 151, 409 n., 452, 513 ; theory
of, 251-315, 558-573.

LAoTzB,20r>,224.

Law, as God, 334-336.

Leibmz, 240, 2741

Leuba, 574-578.

Likeness, 475, 481.

Lippert, 11, 49.

Literality in Religion, 3, 103, 149, 150,

298,3011,422,515.
Locke, 48, 242, 252.
Love, 135, 152, 206, 255 1, 432 1, 437,

451, 507, 535, 577.
Love of God, 123, 341, 359, 361, 366 f.,

375, 422-444, 435 1, 513, 574-57a
Love of life, 202, 436, 437, 438.
Lovejoy, A. 0., 324 n.

584

INDEX

Loyalty, 142, 148, 152, 226, 436-440,

499.

Loyola, 361.
Luther, 361, 383.

MAETEKLINCK, 487 f ., 495, 510.

Magic, 237.

Materialism, 417, 539 n.

McDougall, W., 335.

McTaggart, 105, 207-226.

Mediaeval, Medievalism, 378 n., 480.

Mediation, Mediator (see also Author-
ity, Historical religion, Immediate),
xii, xix, 18(5, 230, 356 f ., 377, 446.

Meditation, 372, 376 &

Metapathy, 72.

Metaphysics, 209 f ., 21^-216,

Mind and body (sec also Body), 201,
261-265,415,540-543, 548.

Miracle, 148, 432, 517.

Mohammed (see also Islam), 512.

Molinos, 384.

Monadism, 244, 275, 297.

Monism, 166-182, 298, 359.

Monotheism, 324-326.

Mood, 550.

Moral tony, 494.

Morals and'Religion, 20, 31, 51, 75, 146,
150, 166, 175, 177, 225, 296, 330-332,
341, 365, 418, 422-424, 427, 482 f.,
498, 512 f., 552, 556, 574-578.

Miinsterberg, 158, 250, 262 n., 288 n.

Mystery (see also Ineffable), 231, 233,
235 f., 398.

Mystics, Mysticism (see also Negative
Aspect, Negative Path), xviii, xix,
53, 00, 61, 100, 105, 323, 327, 337,
SM-M1, 448, 490, 511 ff., 536 f.,
574-578.

Myth, 149.

NATURE, 190, 288, 299, 304, 456, 517,
541 ; as locus of meanings, 118 ; as
object of knowledge, see Knowl-
edge: as source of knowledge of
God, 230-316.

Necessity (see also Freedom), 29, 152,
437, 462, 466, 542.

Negative aspect of religion (see also
Mysticism, Negative path, Religion,
uniqueness of), 6, 21 f., 32, 327,
421.

Negative path, 355, 365, 369-388, 392,
427, 437 f ., 456.

Negativity (see also Change), 188.

Nietzsche, 431 n , 480, 482, 504, 618.

Novelty (see also Change, Creativity),
167,363ff.,448,462T

OBJECTIVITY, 102, 106, 135, 192 f., 284,
307 f., 343; in religion, 29, 30, 57,
78, 150, 152 ; of mind, 07, 135, 513.

Obligation (see also Conscience, Duty),
2<)1.

Observation, 475 f ., 528.

Odes of Solomon, 452 ff.

Omar Khayyam, 189, 328, 430.

Omnipotence, 503.

Ontological argument, 301 ff., 568 ff.

Optimism, 166, 182.

Oracles, 364.

Orgy, 534.

Oriental quality in religion, 149-151.
328, 373.

Originality (see also Creativity), 29,
365, 447 f., 450, 5651

Ostwald, 409 n.

Other-world (see also Immortality),
5-10.

PAIN (see also Evil), 128 n., 218, 491.

Palmer, Frederic, 514 n.

Palmer, G.H., 193,395.

Panpsychism, 318.

Pantheism, 826.

Particular, the, 285, 485-524.

Pascal, 147.

Passion, 106, 123, 400, 534.

Passivity, 162, 372, 382 ff., 413, 419,
422, 425, 432, 4IJ7.

Peace (see also Feeling, Attainment).
65, CO, 72, 218.

Perception, 85, 120, 121.

Persecution, 5H.

Personal religion (see also Mysticism),
336 f .

Personality (see also Character, Indi-
vidual, «elf), 134, 150, 187, 226,
200 f., 264, 200, 335-6, 425, 431,
485-514, 632; of God, see God, per-
sonality of.

Pessimism, see Evil. Optimism.

Petrie,W.M.F.,40;Jn.

Philip of Alcantara, 536.

Philosophy and religion, see Religion.

Physical preparation, 372.

Plato, 483, 503 n., 577.

Play, 151.

Pleasure, 1 27 ff., 418-420 422, 429 n.,
435, 534, 547-551.

Plotinus, 329, 300 n., 395 n.

Pluralism (see also Monism, Independ-
ence, Unfmishedness), 106 ft., 292-
295, 298 f., 359, 406, 410.

Poetry in religion (see also Literality,
Symbol), 149, 150, 452,

Polytheism, 324-326.

INDEX

585

Positive religion (see also Historical re-
ligion, Religion, particular), 519 ff.

Postulate (see also Voluntarism), 146
152, 153, 161, 251.

Potential, see Energy.

Power, love of, 504, 509, 517; in Na-
ture, 216; supreme, 216-222.

Pragmatic method, 4, 6, 10, 165.

Pragmatism (soe also Absolute, Rela-
tivity, Voluntarism), x, xiii-xviii
46 f., 69-72, 113 ff., 139-162, 196
201, 206 ; in China, 147 n.

Prajapati, 102.

Pratt, J. B., 38, 106, 537.

Prayer (see also Worship), 152, 196,
249, 303, 376 f ., 428-441, 445 f ., 479.

Predicates, 87, 96, 97 f., 100-104, 320,
321, 458.

Prince, Morton, 531.

Probability. 167, 214.

Prophecy, 445.

Prophetic consciousness^ 485-614 (esp.
503), 515-519.

Providence, 446, 485, 516.

Pseudo-Dionysius, 355, 395 n.

Psychology, 43, 45.

Psychology of religion, 8, 18, 28-34,
54, 59, 145, 341-516.

Ptah Hotep, 419, 505.

Purgation, 372 ff .

QUANTITY of existence, 72, 440.
Quietism, 332, 386.

REALISM (see also Independence), xi,
282-290, 558-572.

Reality (see also Absolute, Substance),
xiii, 112, 119, 147, 161, 161, 168, 184,
194, 198, 303-310,489, 500,512,562,
571 ; interest in, ' purely theoretical/
115, 122 f.

Reason, Reasoning (see also Faith,
Feeling, Knowledge, Idea), 88, 96,
155, 530, 546.

Reconciliation, 237-239.

Redemption, Redeemer (see also Medi-
ation), 357, 520.

Reflexion, 470-475, 511.

Reflexive turn, the, 192 ff., 281.

Relations, inner and outer, 276, 298, 334.

Relativity (see also Absolute), 193,
411 n., 414 n.

Religion and the Arts (see also Arts),
ii, 31, 103, 138; and morals, see
Morals; and philosophy, 304, 842;
authoritative, see Authority, Historic
Religion; evolution of, 14-23, 41,
145, 154, 185, 229-240, 317-337, 345,

458, 519 ff ; fruits of (see also God,
work of), chh. ii, iii, xxx-xxxiii, also
pp. 6, 237; nature of, 14, 31, 49, 57,
72 f., 105, 137, 141 f., 153, 2381;
Particular, positive (see also Institu-
tion, Historical religion), xii, xviii,
28, 519 ff.; propagation of, 41, 42,
57, 78, 518 ff.; psychology of, see
Psychology; social and political as-
pect of (see also State), 6, 11, 12, 17,
31, 141, 152, 160, 212 f., 237 f., 347,
367, 402 f., 448 n., 454, 517 ff., 578;
uniqueness, supremacy (see also Neg-
ative aspect), 22, 51.

Renaissance, 513.

Renunciation, 373, 501, 509.

Resentment, 145, 154, 224, 239.

Resignation, 499, 501.

Revelation, 53, 54, 58, 148, 154,229,
362,433,445,447-461.

Rhythm, 391 ff.

Rickert, 158, 253.

Right, 193, 197, 251.

Rights, 23, 24; religious, 436 &

Risk, 171, 179.

Rite, ritual, 345.

Romanticism, 416, 434.

Rousseau, 6.

Royce, xii, xxii, 158, 206, 246, 248, 249,
307, 351, 387 n.,498 f.,503, 547) 558!

Ruysbroeck, 381.

SABATIEB, A., 38, 147.

Sacrifice, 347, 421.

Salvation (see also Immortality), 16,

195, 198, 446, 451, 512 f., 523.
Schleiermacher, 38, 64, 137.
Scholastics, 60, 01.
Schopenhauer, 166.
Science (see also Knowledge), 42, 178,

174 ff., 513.

Scientific reaction, 174.
Scriptures, 445-461.
Scin and Bewusstsein, 203, 475 n.
Self (see also Personality, Substance),

194, 201 ff., 241, 244-245, 253, 366,

412, 414, 430, 472, 483, 542, 561,

566 f.; as source of change, 188 ff.
Self-consciousness, 150, 201, 235, 252,

296, 308, 322 n., 359-360, 383, 419,

420, 422, 453, 47<M77, 527, 561.
Self-assertion, 29, 146, 359-360, 367,

375, 419, 436, 438, 503 ff.
Self-preservation (see also Immortality,

Love of life), 49, 106, 203, 366.

Of-righting, 175.
Sensation, 25 155, 285, 286, 301 f ., 313,

561,563.

586

INDEX

Sentiment, 530.

Sentimentality, 77, 199, 344.

Sex and religious feeling, 574-578.

Shakespeare, 506.

Silesius, 61.

Simplicity, 383, 432, 437, 509.

Sm, 415 n., 419 n., 513, 515, 537.

Sincerity, 418, 437, 438.

Siva, 1S6.

Skepticism, 192, 252.

Sleep, 397, 420, 533 f ., 536.

Social experience, 222, 231-300, 409,

567 £ ; and theoretical attitude, 116.
Social evil^ 176.
Social service, 17.
Socrates, 505, 512.
Solipsism, 246.

Solitude, 271, 299, 402 ff., 622 n.
Sorrow (see also Evil), 491.
Space, 203 f., 270, 299, 307, 545,
Spencer, Herbert, 90, 547, 551 f ., 657.
Spinoza, 195, 465, 512, 573, 677.
Spiritism, 231-233, 317-8.
Starbuck, 73.
State, the (see also Religion, social and

political aspect), 140 f., 152, 160, 173,

176, 178, 212,328, 334 £., 454, 516,

520 f., 523, 563-567, 669-570, 672.
Stirner, Max, 430 n.
Stoicism, 72, 196, 200, 377, 489, 495 f .,

509 f., 518
Strenuousness, 530.
Snbconscionsness (see also Instinct),

105-107, 371, 414, 420, 687-538.
Subject, retrfttt into the, 100-108, 195,

etc, 277, 297.
Subjectivity, 403 f.
Substance (see also Reality), 115, 119 ff.,

185. 200, 270, 290, 365, 409.
Suffering- (see also Evil), 200.
Supernature, see Other-world.
Suso, 382, 394.
Symbol, 4, 75.
Sympathy, 135, 416

TAO,334.

Tauler, 370, 373, 879, 380 n., 382, 675 f ,

Teleological argument, 305.

Telepathy, 256-259.

Temperament, 360, 456, 483.

Tennyson, 430.

Teresa, 360, 374 n., 378, 381, 886, 394,

478.
* That ' and c What ' (see also Form and

Matter), 52, 101, 296, 453.
Theologia Gfermanioa, 373, 874, 896 n.
Theoretical attitude (see aba Idea,

independence of feeling), 109 ff., 138;

413.

Thompson, Francis, 507.
Tiele, a P., 330, 371.
Time, 198, 190, 26,'3, 429-430, 5121,

545 ; existence in, xvi ; ideas of, 86.
Tolstoy, 423 f ., 447, 400-8, 470, 473.
Tradition, 353, 450, 480.
Transcendence, 326.
Transiency, 390.
Trilemma of knowledge, 252-263.
Truth (See also Idea, Idealism, Knowl-

edge, Pragmatism, etc.), xiii, 01, 102,
. 103, 150, 154; inaccessible, xvi ; un-

finished, xvi, 139 ff.

UlSTFINISHBDNKSfl, X, xi, XVI, XVU, 140.

Unhappiuess, 491 f.
Union, 388, 390.

Universal (seo also Abstract Universal,
Concrete Universal, Irrelevant Uni-
versal), 280, 420, 428, 451, 506, 544.
Universal religion, 520, 523.

VALUE (ace also Good, Beauty,

piness, Morals, Pleasure), xiii, 68,
125, ff., 147 f., 201 ff., esp. 204, 206,
237, 328, 418-419, 420,485,437, 488,

Vedanta, 351.
Verification, 279-280.
Vicarious happiness, 490 ff., 610.
Voluntarism (aoo also Action-theory,

Pragmatism, Will-to-believe), 189-

102,250.

WAB, virtues of, 509.

Wells, H.G., 89.

Wesley, John, 861.

Whole-idea, 94 ff., 129 ff., 146, 168,199,

200, 218, 233, 408-41 1 , 4 15, 423, 488 f.,

438, 473, 477, 482, 488, 492, 602, 546.
Will, 140 ff., 157, 341 ff., 881,410-427,

436-488, 440, 450, 480, 492, 627, 631,

672.

Will to believe, xvi, 140 ff., 178, 399.
Will to live, see Self-preservation*
Work, 414, 418, 425, 426.
Worship (see also Prayer), vi, xi, 152t

284, 329, $41~W (eip., 418 ff.),

491, 522. 586,
Wundt, 247.

YOGI, 879.

ZENO,86.